<P> Novelist and essayist Richard Wright condemned Their Eyes Were Watching God, writing in a review for New Masses (1935): </P> <P> Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction...(She) can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley...Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears . </P> <P> Ralph Ellison said the book contained a "blight of calculated burlesque ." </P> <P> Alain Locke writes in a review: "when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly--which is Miss Hurston's cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?" </P>

Summary of their eyes were watching god book