Few 20th-century American novels are more widely celebrated than Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The work, which traces a Southern black woman’s odyssey through poverty and difficult marriages toward self-understanding, has been praised by countless scholars and writers, was adapted into a television film starring Halle Berry and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, and, as of 2023, was assigned in more college courses than any other novel written by an American woman.

The book’s popularity is remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, when Hurston died in 1960, she was poor and obscure. Her reputation only began ascending in the 1970s, thanks largely to the advocacy of the novelist Alice Walker, who was a great admirer of Hurston. Hurston’s present popularity is also remarkable because she was one of the most unappreciated types of Americans: a black conservative. Especially in her essays, Hurston expresses an abiding love for the United States and a disdain for communism. She felt a strong pride in her race and rejected victimhood: “I am not tragically colored,” she writes, “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.” Although she saw the injustice of Jim Crow, she thought Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided because it implied black students could only learn if white students were around them.