Their Eyes Were Watching God
Published in 1937, ignored for decades, resurrected by Alice Walker in the 1970s. Hurston's vernacular prose captures Black Southern speech as a living literature. Janie Crawford's search for her own horizon, not a man's version of it, makes this a feminist epic that predates the movement by a generation.
The dialect is spelled phonetically throughout, and readers report sounding words out syllable by syllable: "too many sound-it-out words," until "my eyes were aching" and "the dialogue's so grating to read." Between the porch scenes the book meanders, "lacking a conventional plot and resolution" for readers who want a build. The men's storytelling sequences read as transcribed stage business rather than novel. Janie's most sympathetic partner still hits her, and the book files that under acceptable. And the sharpest charge came from Hurston's own contemporaries, Wright and Ellison among them, who called the comic dialect "a blight of calculated burlesque," a book "not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
