This paper examines two American masterpieces of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Grapes of Wrath, written respectively by Zora Neale Hurston, a black novelist, and John Steinbeck, a white novelist. The paper discusses the orthographic representation of non-standard American English by comparing the spelling systems of those masterpieces. Although we see many spelling differences between black American English and white non-standard American English, the two writers basically follow the orthography of non-standard American English.