Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was a novelist and folklorist, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance and one of the major American writers of the 20th-century. She spent most of her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, and studied anthropology at Howard University in Washington, DC and Barnard College in New York, where she was the sole Black student. Hurston pursued lifelong interests in African-American folklore, hoodoo and music, carrying out ethnographic research across the South of the United States and the Caribbean. She collected hundreds of folk tales, which deeply influenced her own writing, including Their Eyes Were Watching God. Alongside her writing and research, Hurston taught drama at what was then the North Carolina College for Negroes. Hurston’s writing was neglected in her lifetime and she died in poverty; her grave was unmarked until the novelist Alice Walker located it in 1972. Since then Hurston’s reputation has been reassessed and she is internationally renowned as a key figure in African-American literature.
Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth (2000), was written while she was still studying English literature at King’s College, Cambridge and immediately became a major success, winning many awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Her subsequent novels include On Beauty, NW and the Booker longlisted Swing Time; they have been widely acclaimed for their acute understanding of race, class and life in contemporary London and the United States. Smith’s essays for The New Yorker and elsewhere have been collected, most recently in the volume Feel Free. She is a professor of creative writing at New York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.