Janie Crawford tells her story to her friend Pheoby, moving from her grandmother's dreams through two wrong marriages to the love she finally finds with Tea Cake. Hurston wrote this in seven weeks in Haiti, and the prose sings with Black Southern dialect, with folklore, with desire. The novel was attacked by Richard Wright for not being political enough; it fell out of print; Alice Walker rediscovered it. The pear tree in bloom; the horizon Janie has been to; the hurricane that takes everything: the images have become part of American literature. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Janie came back to tell hers.