"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone.  Dawn and doom was in the branches."

from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

My friend Jason sent me a box of books a few months ago.  Some good, good books.  You’ve probably seen many of them listed in my "sidebar" inventory of the things I’ve been reading.  The second to last one from the box that I picked up to read, Their Eyes Were Watching God, took me by surprise.  It took me by surprise because it was so well written.

Not all prose reads like poetry.  Not all books can be called literature.  But I think Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece of poetic-prose which should be immediately inducted into the "canon" of great American literature (if it hasn’t been already?)  That’s a pretty bold statement, I know.  But since I’m only an amateur critic I can say things like that.

When I say that this book contains poetic prose, I don’t mean that the book contains lyrical, rhyming verse or is overly symbolic/abstract.  What I mean is that the imagery that Hurston uses jumps off the page at times in evocative and often beautiful ways.  I don’t want to say too much about this book because I think it is one that deserves a reader’s exploration.  I will say that I am amazed that I have never heard of this writer before now.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised since Hurston was an African American woman writing in the pre-civil rights era of American history, but once you read a few chapters of her work her relative "anonymity" seems even more tragic.

Alice Walker even wrote an article about this "unearthing" of Zora Neale Hurston in the early 70s bringing greater awareness to Hurston’s life and work.  Having only read this one work by Hurston, I still say that her writing should be valued just as highly as any of her predecessors’ or contemporaries’ (including Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc.)

Simply put: I guess you could say I liked this book.  It took me to a world I’d never been to before in the country (and state) that I often call "home".