<P> Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti to research Obeah practices in the West Indies . </P> <P> Hurston's political views in Their Eyes Were Watching God were met with resistance from several leading Harlem Renaissance authors . </P> <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>

Why was the book called their eyes were watching god