Prologue

Dear Reader

            During the cultural, social, and artistic movement that is the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston wrote her most famous and revolutionary book Their Eyes Were Watching God.  This coming of age story follows the endurance of mulatto woman and tells her influential and inspiring story about her love and life.  Similarly, the classic, Lord of the Flies, written in 1954 by William Golding, was a coming of age story that explored the survival of a group of boys on a deserted island. 

            In the beginning of Hurston’s novel we open in a gossip–filled southern town where our protagonist, Janie, returns wearing overalls from her life from amenity with a braid down her back.  One of her old friends, Phoebe, listens to her story starting with her childhood all the way to the reason why she returns from her prosperous life.  We follow Janie’s life starting a couple years before her first unsuccessful marriage, set up by her grandmother, to an older, wealthy, and powerful man.  This story focuses on Janie as she grows up in racially segregated time where she realizes that love is not the dreamy fairytale that she expected.  Lord of the Flies opens during a war crisis as a plane crashes, leaving a group of British school-boys stranded on an uninhabited island with no adult supervision, thus forcing the boys to make decisions about what is morally right and what is wrong.

I enjoyed reading both of these two inspiring and empowering books, especially Their Eyes were Watching God after living so close to the Baltimore riots, however, I really love reading Lord of the Flies because it is the survival situation that all young boys daydream about.  Both of these books keep the reader engaged, making them always wanting to know what will happen next to the main characters.  All throughout this multi-genre research paper I tried to reiterate the idea of surviving through puberty growing up.  After all Janie had to grow up with her childhood dream of true love being shattered, as well as having to survive in a society that forces her to be “the mule” of society.  The boys’, in Lord of the Flies, story throughout the entire story revolved around their survival as young teenagers.  This project consists of creative works that I feel capture the essence of both of the books, through the themes of survival and coming of age, themes that would be in the Harlem Renaissance and in Lord of the Flies.