When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared, it was warmly received by white Critics. Lucille Tompkins of the New York Times Book Review called it "a well nigh perfect story-a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor" But many of Hurston's fellow writers of the Harlem Renaissance criticized the novel for not addressing "serious" issues, namely strained race relations. Alain Locke, reviewing for Opportunity, recognized the author's "gift for poetic phrase, for rare dialect, and folk humor," but he asks, "when will the Negro novelist of maturity... come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?" Richard Wright, in his review in New Masses, had even more scathing objections to the novel. According to Wright, "Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is...