The Wedding: A Novel
by Dorothy West
from Anchor
While younger writers obsess over the need to show rather than tell, the octogenarian West simply grabs you by the lapels and drags you headlong through a multigenerational saga of affluent, Martha's Vineyard blacks who are so fair in complexion that they're almost white. And she does it all in something like 225 pages, sounding very much like Faulkner even when she's over the top, which is only now and then. You won't mind, because there is greatness here as well as gripping storytelling.
The publication  of The Wedding by Dorothy West,  the last surviving member of the Harlem  Renaissance, was not only a landmark literary event, but a  commercial success as well. Readers across America  responded to West's delicat weaving of North and  South, black and white, past and present in this  "fascinating and engrossing tale"  (People) of race and class set in Martha's  Vineyard.In her first novel in forty-seven years,  West offers a window into the rise of the black  middle class as she lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, The Wedding is Dorothy West's crowning achievement, and one of the last books edited for Doubleday by the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Living is Easy
by Dorothy West
from The Feminist Press at CUNY
One of only a handful of novels published by black women during the forties, the story of ambitious Cleo Judson is a long-time cult classic. The Living Is Easy is delightfully wry and ironic humor-even bitchiness-of the novel coexists with a challenging moral and social complexity.
"A powerful work."-Essence
"Dorothy West is a brisk storyteller with an eye for ironic detail...a deft stylist and writer of social satire."-Ms.
"Long beloved for its wry and ironic humor, this novel continues to delight and challenge readers."-Feminist Bookstore News
* Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs *
Suggested for course use in:
African-American studies
20th-century U.S. literature
The Richer, the Poorer
by Dorothy West
from Anchor
On the heels of the bestseller success of her  novel The Wedding, Dorothy West,  the last surviving member of the Harlem  Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that  explore both the realism of everyday life, and the  fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of one  woman's life in a mythic time. Traversing the  universal themes and conflicts between poverty and  prosperity, men and women, and young and old, and  compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,  The Richer, The Poorer not only  affords an unparalleled window into the  African-American middle class, but also delves into the  richness of experience of "one of the finest writers  produced in this country during the Roaring  Twenties"(Book Page).
The Last Leaf of Harlem: Selected and Newly Discovered Fiction by the Author of The Wedding
by Dorothy West
from St. Martin's Press
A literary event—selected and previously uncollected fiction by the woman who was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance.
When Dorothy West died in 1998, she was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, a contemporary of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Popular history holds that between the publication of her two novels (The Living is Easy in 1948 and The Wedding in 1995), Dorothy West fell silent.
In fact, there was never a time in Dorothy West’s life in which she was not writing and publishing. The Last Leaf of Harlem gathers West’s writing from these supposedly silent years--syndicated fiction in the New York Daily News, pieces for the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s Project, and publications in small journals and magazines--along with known and beloved pieces by this extraordinary writer.
Many of these stories, describing and exploring marriage, loss, family life, and poverty were lost until now. The Last Leaf of Harlem brings together the almost-forgotten pieces of Dorothy West’s lifework, and gives the reader a fresh look into a remarkable writer and career.
DOROTHY WEST was born in Boston circa 1908. At her death in 1998, she was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. Her works include: The Living is Easy, The Wedding, and The Richer, The Poorer. LIONEL C. BASCOM is a professor of English at Western Connecticut State University. A long-time investigative journalist, Bascom has specialized lately in the discovery of forgotten or neglected literary manuscripts by early 20th Century African-Americans, black folklore and stories about black culture in the United States. He is the editor of A Renaissance in Harlem and lives in Danbury, Connecticut.
Where The Wild Grape Grows: Selected Writings, 1930-1950
by Dorothy West
from University of Massachusetts Press
Despite her strong associations with Massachusetts--her upbringing in Roxbury, her lifelong connection with Martha's Vineyard, and two novels documenting the Great Migration and the rise and decline of Boston's African American community--Dorothy West (1907-1998) is perhaps best known as a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Between 1927 and 1947, West and her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, lived in New York City where West attended Columbia University, worked as a welfare investigator, wrote for the WPA, traveled to Russia, and established a literary magazine for young black writers.
During these years, West and Johnson knew virtually everyone in New York's artistic, intellectual, and political circles. Their friends included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and many others. West moved easily between the bohemian milieu of her artistic soul mates and the bourgeois, respectable soirees of prominent social and political figures.
In this book, Professors Mitchell and Davis provide a carefully researched profile of West and her circle that serves as an introduction to a well-edited, representative collection of her out-of-print, little-known, or unpublished writings, supplemented by many family photographs. The editors document West's "womanist" upbringing and her relationships with her mother, Rachel Benson West, and other strong-minded women, including her longtime companion Marian Minus.
The volume includes examples of West's probing social criticism in the form of WPA essays and stories, as well as her interviews with Southern migrants. A centerpiece of the book is her unpublished novella, "Where the Wild Grape Grows," which explores with grace and gentle irony the complex relationship of three retired women living on Martha's Vineyard. Several of West's exquisitely observed nature pieces, published over a span of twenty years in the "Vineyard Gazette," are also reprinted.
The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard: Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette
by Dorothy West
from McFarland & Company
This book is a compilation of selected stories, essays, and reminiscences that Dorothy West wrote for the Vineyard Gazette from the 1960s to the early 1990s. In these entries, West retraces life on the island as she experienced it from 1908, when she was an infant, to 1993 when she wrote her final column. Born in 1907 in Boston, Dorothy West went on to develop into a prize-winning author by the time she was in her teens. The 1926 award she received in New York, and the lure of the city itself, inspired West to leave Boston and join what was then a fledgling literary movement that would evolve into the Harlem Renaissance. She circulated among what in essence was the black literary "royalty" of her times, of which she was a signal member. By the mid-1940s West had returned to Massachusetts, to Martha's Vineyard. She began to write a column for the local paper about the comings and goings of island residents and visitors. It was her column in the Gazette that drew the attention of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who, on one of her island visits, met the author and expressed her admiration. Onassis, at the time, just happened to be an editor at Doubleday. When Onassis learned of a decades-old manuscript that had been laid aside, she urged West to pick up the work again. West later dedicated this book "To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners." The authors selected from the Gazette columns that West wrote over the three decades, those on people, events, and nature that seemed to have the greatest historic, artistic, or philosophical import.
The Living Is Easy (BOMC)
by Dorothy West
from Quality Paperback Book Club
This is a reprint for BOMC of the Feminist Press edition of the powerful, classic African American novel of women in the 1940s.
Interview with Dorothy West: May 6, 1978 (Black women oral history project)
Dot and Dash at the maple sugar camp (Dot and Dash books)
by Dorothy West
from Cupples & Leon
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