FOLKLORE AND VOODOO IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD.

Zora Neale Hurston's best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), has become a major part of the African American as well as the American literary canon, though it had not always received a large readership. As a trained ethnologist (B.A., Columbia University, 1928), Hurston had conducted field work in the Southern states of the U.S. as well as in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti, and published in scholarly journals as well as one book of collected folklore, Mules and Men (1935) before Their Eyes Were Watching God was written and published. This contribution attempts to show the impact and influence her cultural anthropology field work exerted on the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]