Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece — following Janie Crawford through three marriages and her journey toward self-realisation in the Black communities of Florida — was dismissed on publication and largely forgotten until Alice Walker's 1975 essay rediscovered it. Now considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the greatest American novels ever written, its use of African-American vernacular dialect was revolutionary.