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Start giftingTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Narrator
Ruby Dee
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Length
6 hours 44 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. ”
— Colleen • Read Between the Lynes
Bookseller recommendation
“This is easily the best performance of an audiobook I've listened to, ever. Ruby Dee is so comfortable inside the lives and words of Janie and her friends and husbands and everyone in this masterpiece.”
— Kristen • Bestsellers Books & Coffee Co.
“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature. The audio is performed by the legendary Ruby Dee.
Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. She wrote four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountains, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Every Tongue Got to Confess, 2001); a work of anthropological research, (Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); an international bestselling nonfiction work (Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” 2018); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1928. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida.
Not only is Ruby Dee one of the most respected African-American actors of her day, she was also an important part of the civil rights movement. She is probably best known for her role in A Raisin in the Sun, which she performed on both the stage and the screen.
Dee has also written plays, fiction, and a column in New York's Amsterdam News.
Born in Cleveland, she worked initially with the American Negro Theater in Harlem, where she grew up. She is married to the actor and author Ossie Davis.
