In the after­word to “Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God,” Hen­ry Louis Gates Jr. reflects on the lega­cy of Zora Neale Hurston, a promi­nent African Amer­i­can writer whose con­tri­bu­tions were ini­tial­ly over­looked despite her sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence. Hurston, a Barnard grad­u­ate, authored sev­en books and pub­lished numer­ous short­er works dur­ing her career, but her inde­pen­dent views and refusal to con­form to main­stream lit­er­ary expec­ta­tions led to her obscu­ri­ty after the ear­ly 1950s. Gates high­lights Hurston’s com­plex iden­ti­ty and her rejec­tion of sim­plis­tic cat­e­go­riza­tions such as “rad­i­cal” or “con­ser­v­a­tive,” which com­pli­cate her lega­cy in the lit­er­ary canon.

The resur­gence of inter­est in Hurston’s work, par­tic­u­lar­ly among black women writ­ers, seeks to con­nect her to their lit­er­ary her­itage. Alice Walker’s influ­en­tial 1975 essay played a piv­otal role in this redis­cov­ery, pre­sent­ing Hurston as a sym­bol of black wom­en’s search for iden­ti­ty and tra­di­tion. Gates notes that Hurston’s notable employ­ment of ver­nac­u­lar lan­guage deeply res­onates in her nov­els and is espe­cial­ly evi­dent in “Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God.” This work, accord­ing to Gates, embod­ies a bold fem­i­nist nar­ra­tive where the pro­tag­o­nist, Janie Craw­ford, evolves from being an object of her hus­bands’ desires to express­ing her own auton­o­my, there­by align­ing the nov­el with mod­ern fem­i­nist dis­course.

Gates draws par­al­lels between Hurston’s rela­tion­ship with her moth­er, as depict­ed in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy “Dust Tracks on a Road,” and the marked­ly dif­fer­ent por­tray­al in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” While Hurston frames her expe­ri­ence as a search for voice, Wright presents it through a lens of pain and emo­tion­al dis­tance. This con­trast exem­pli­fies the bifur­ca­tion between their lit­er­ary approach­es and sig­nif­i­cances.

More­over, Gates cri­tiques the soci­etal ide­olo­gies that pigeon­holed black lit­er­a­ture, sug­gest­ing that Hurston’s opti­mistic por­tray­al of black iden­ti­ty was dis­missed by her con­tem­po­raries as polit­i­cal­ly regres­sive. He argues that her refusal to con­form to pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tives about race led to her under­ap­pre­ci­a­tion dur­ing her life but has result­ed in a remark­able renais­sance of her works and themes in mod­ern lit­er­a­ture.

The final sec­tions pro­vide insight into Hurston’s styl­is­tic com­plex­i­ties and her dual iden­ti­ty as both a woman and a black indi­vid­ual in Amer­i­ca. Gates argues that her lega­cy today is a tes­ta­ment to her skill­ful nav­i­ga­tion of lan­guage and iden­ti­ty, both in her life and in her work, assert­ing that Hurston’s art con­tin­ues to influ­ence and inspire con­tem­po­rary writ­ers and schol­ars alike.