Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Inscribed to Percival M. Punter
“that beautiful soul who is the inspiration of this book”
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. A novel. Philadelphia/London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1937.
8vo.; hinge cracked at title page; orange cloth stamped in black; lightly soiled and frayed; spine cloth detached along upper joint; black topstain; pictorial dust-jacket; internal tape repairs; chip to upper panel removing three letters from the title; small chip to lower panel. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of Hurston’s masterwork, a novel of female heroism and self-discovery set in the early 20th-century rural south. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page to her former lover: To Percival M. Punter, that beautiful soul who is the inspiration of this book. Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston met Punter, 21 years her junior, in 1928 while he was an undergraduate at City College in New York. They started dating four years later, after Punter was cast in a New York production of Hurston’s play, “The Great Day.” She later wrote, “his looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous” (Wrapped in Rainbows, The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 271). Jealousy and pettiness soon disrupted their passionate love affair, however. Hurston’s burgeoning success and ever-increasing circle of famous friends made Punter wary; he wanted her to stay home, take care of him, and forget about writing. Hurston recognized Punter’s hold on her, and later explained, “I was hog-tied and branded, but he didn’t realize it. He could make me fetch and carry, but he wouldn’t believe it” (ibid., p. 273). Still, she refused to give up her writing career, and this disagreement festered until it ultimately destroyed their relationship.
Hurston’s relationship with Punter—or, rather, its dissolution—led directly to the composition of Their Eyes Were Watching God. After a particularly volatile physical argument, Hurston left Punter to assist on an African-American folksong and folklore finding expedition in the South. While the couple may not have realized it at the time, their last altercation had irreparably ruptured their union. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936, Hurston would spend an entire year in Jamaica and Haiti, collecting material relating to the “study of magic practices among Negroes in the West Indies.” She began writing Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti and completed it in seven weeks; it was published on September 18, 1937. Hurston explained, “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness and passion for [Punter]” in the novel (Boyd, p. 294). Hurston would reflectively classify Punter as “the greatest love of her life,” though in reality, their union was fraught with ups and downs. When not with Punter, Hurston filled the void with plenty of other men, two of whom – Albert Price and James Howell Pitts – she briefly married. All of the men in her life were significantly younger than she was. She was even rumored to have had an intimate relationship with a student while teaching at the North Carolina College for Negroes.
A stellar presentation copy of a foundational work. In the scarce gold, white, and black dust-jacket, printing praise of her first book, Mules and Men, on the lower panel and a plot summary on the flaps, along with scant biographical information including Hurston’s two Guggenheim fellowships (1936 and 1937), and her honorable mention in the Book-of-the-Month Club Awards (1937). Both this and the first English edition, published the following year by J.M. Dent, were issued in very short press runs—most likely fewer than 1000 copies each.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was a sleeper with a gestation period of four to six de
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