Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Current Events & Pop Culture
Available to teachers only as part of the Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God Teacher Pass
Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God Teacher Pass includes:
- Assignments & Activities
- Reading Quizzes
- Current Events & Pop Culture articles
- Discussion & Essay Questions
- Challenges & Opportunities
- Related Readings in Literature & History
Sample of Current Events & Pop Culture
"Jump at de Sun"
There are several biographies of Hurston, but writer Kristal Zook’s article “Jump at de Sun” in The Nation is one of the more concise and complete accounts. Zook looks at how complex Hurston was as both a writer and a woman. We also get glimpses of how much Hurston fused elements of her own life into Their Eyes Were Watching God.
“Picture Zora: flagrantly smoking Pall Malls in public with an openly gay male friend; measuring the heads of strangers on Harlem street corners in famously brazen anthropometry experiments; driving a car (alone, female, along backwoods Southern roads in the 1920s, packing a chrome-plated pistol); marrying men decades her junior and promptly leaving them, while habitually lopping ten years or more off her own age.”