In the following original essay, Whitt examines Hurston's work on a number of levels, assessing the plot, characters, themes, evolution of the work, the novel's historical significance, and how the work has been studied since its publication. The parenthetical page numbers that appear throughout this essay refer to the edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God published by J. B. Lippincott (Philadelphia) in 1937.

In the following essay, Corse and Griffin explore the process of forming the African-American literary canon by analyzing the critical history of a key text—Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

In the following essay, Lawrence discusses Hurston's Mules and Men and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as ethnographies, contending that “folklorists and anthropologists must trust in Hurston's skill as both a scientist and an artist in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the value of these works as exceptional representations of African American culture.”

In the following essay, Gates details the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Hurston on the play Mule Bone, and describes the plot and historical influence of the drama.

In the following review, originally published in the Los Angeles Times on February 24, 1991, Pacheco acknowledges the dramatic limitations of Mule Bone but favorably assesses its first production in 1991.

In the following review, originally published in the New York Times on February 10, 1991, Gates considers Hurston's desire to portray authentic black culture in Mule Bone.

It is appropriate that Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God should be reissued almost simultaneously. Both works can rightfully be considered classic studies of Afro-American culture. Zora Neale Hurston—novelist, folklorist, and essayist—wrote about Afro-American culture with an insight and perception shared by few black writers. Throughout her varied career Hurston tended to combine her two passions, folklore and literature, in interesting and compelling ways. She has often been acc...

[Their Eyes Were Watching God] is not a great novel, or anything like that, but it is one of those books about which it can be said that if it had not been written, there would be something that most of us would not know; it belongs on Randall Jarrell's wonderful list of books that are very good and unimportant. Its chief problem is a language problem, one easily illustrated by a passage like this: "'Taint no use in you cryin', Janie. Grandma done been long uh few ro...

[Zora Hurston] is an author who writes with her head as well as with her heart, and at a time when there seems to be some principle of physics set dead against the appearance of novelists who give out a cheerful warmth and at the same time write with intelligence. You have to be as tired as I am of writers who offer to do as much for folks as Atlas, Joan of Arc, Faith, Hope and Charity, Numerology, NBC and Q.E.D. to be as pleased as I am with Zora Hurston's ["Their Eyes Were Watching God...

Hurston's evocations of the lifestyles of rural blacks [in Their Eyes Were Watching God] have not been equaled; but to stress the ruralness of Hurston's settings or to characterize her diction solely in terms of exotic "dialect" spellings is to miss her deftness with language. In the speech of her characters, black voices—whether rural or urban, northern or southern—come alive. Her fidelity to diction, metaphor, and syntax—whether in direct quotations or in p...

Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction. (pp. 22, 25) Miss Hurston can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue [in Their Eyes Were Watching God] manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that's as far as it goes.