1 - Introduction

Summary

IN Dust Tracks on a Road, an autobiography written at the urging of her editor, Bertram Lippincott, Zora Neale Hurston expresses some dissatisfaction with her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watch ing God, which was published in 1937. She says of the novel:

I wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish that I could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself “Why?” afterwards than before.

Hurston voices the frustrations of an artist brought up in an oral culture like that of her birthplace, Eatonville, Florida, a source of inspiration throughout her writing career and, as she informs us on her autobiography's first page, the first black community in America “to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America.” In Eatonville, as Hurston writes in Their Eyes Were Watching God, storytellers sat on the porch of Mayor Joe Clarke's (Starks's in the novel) store and “passed around pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see” (48).