West, Dorothy (1907–1998)

Youngest writer of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s who went on to develop a literary career spanning eight decades . Name variations: (pseudonyms) Mary Christopher; Jane Isaac. Born Dorothy West on June 2, 1907, in Boston, Massachusetts; died, age 91, on August 16, 1998, in Boston, Massachusetts; daughter of Isaac Christopher West (an entrepreneur) and Rachel Pease (Benson) West; attended public schools in Boston and graduated from Girls' Latin School in 1923; attended Columbia University; never married; no children.

Wrote her first short story at age seven; began publishing stories in the Boston Post while still in her teens; shared second place award with Zora Neale Hurston in Opportunity writing contest (1926); moved to New York with cousin Helene Johnson during the height of the Harlem Renaissance; spent a year in Russia; founded Challenge magazine (1934) and New Challenge (1937); worked as a welfare investigator and as a writer for the Federal Writers' Project during the Great Depression; published more than two dozen short stories in the New York Daily News (1940s–1950s); moved to the island of Martha's Vineyard (mid-1940s), where she wrote a column for the local newspaper; published first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948); published a collection of stories and reminiscences, The Richer, the Poorer, and her second novel, The Wedding (1995).

Selected works:

"The Typewriter," in Opportunity (Vol. 4, July 1926, pp. 220–222, 233–234); "An Unimportant Man," in Saturday Evening Quill (Vol. 1, June 1928, pp. 21–32); "Prologue to a Life," in Saturday Evening Quill (Vol. 2, April 1929, pp. 5–10); The Living Is Easy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1948); "Elephant's Dance: A Memoir of Wallace Thurman," in Black World (Vol. 20, November 1970, pp. 77–85); "My Mother, Rachel West," in Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960 (ed. by Mary Helen Washington, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1987, pp. 381–383); The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences (NY: Doubleday, 1995); The Wedding (NY: Doubleday, 1995). Contributed to the Boston Post, the New York Daily News, and the Vineyard Gazette.

By the time Dorothy West moved from her family's home in Boston to a room at the YWCA in New York City's Harlem in 1926, the New Negro Movement, also later known as the Harlem Renaissance, was well under way. The 1920s ushered in a decade-long interest in African-American culture and an outpouring of art, music, and writing enjoyed by whites as well as blacks. The young poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and fiction writers Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay were beginning to gain national reputations, and novelists Zora Neale Hurston , Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen were hard at work, intent on doing the same. Still in her teens but already a published short-story writer, West became the youngest participant in the Harlem Renaissance. More than six decades later, she would become its oldest living survivor and experience a renaissance of her own.

Dorothy West was born in 1907, the only child of Isaac West, a former slave from Virginia who had moved to Boston and developed a thriving wholesale produce company, and Rachel Benson West , who was originally from South Carolina. Rachel apparently married the much older Isaac for the financial security he provided for her and her numerous brothers and sisters and their children.

When she was four, Dorothy was enrolled in the Boston public schools, where working-class students occasionally taunted her with racial epithets. At ten, she started attending the private, upper-class Girls' Latin School. She had begun crafting short stories at age seven and, by fifteen, was publishing fiction in the Boston Post, which frequently awarded her cash prizes in its weekly writing contests. When she was 17, she entered her story "The Typewriter" in a contest sponsored by Opportunity, the National Urban League's magazine, and won second place, which she shared with the older and more experienced writer Zora Neale Hurston. West traveled to New York City to accept the prize and decided to stay, sharing with her cousin, poet Helene Johnson , first a Harlem-area YWCA room and then Hurston's old apartment. In addition to being published in Opportunity, "The Typewriter" was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1926. That year another of West's stories, "Hannah Byde," appeared in the radical magazine the Messenger. While in New York City, she attended classes at Columbia University, studying philosophy and journalism.

Between 1928 and 1930, the Saturday Evening Quill, a little magazine produced by a black literary organization called the Boston Quill Club, published more of West's stories, including "An Unimportant Man" and "Prologue to a Life." Around the same time, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation awarded her a grant to support her creative writing.

In 1927, she landed a small part in the play Porgy by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (which was later adapted by George Gershwin into the opera Porgy and Bess) and traveled with the theater group in 1929 for a summer-long engagement in London. Three years later, at the suggestion of journalist Henry Moon, West joined an entourage of about two dozen African-American actors and intellectuals in Russia to shoot a movie exposing American racism, although the project was never completed. Despite this, West stayed a year to work with the film company and to do some writing and teaching. Even though she considered this period the most carefree time of her life, she ultimately rejected Communism, declaring herself too independent to claim a cause, and returned late in 1933 to Boston where her ill mother was coping with the death of West's father.

I remember turning to my father and saying, "I don't belong to you," and turning to my mother and saying, "I don't belong to you either. I belong to myself."

—Dorothy West

Feeling that, at age 25, she had not fulfilled her early promise as a writer and that the Harlem Renaissance had waned without giving young people like herself a chance to be heard, West launched a new little magazine, Challenge, in 1934. She published well-known writers, including Hurston, Johnson, Hughes, Cullen, McKay, and Arna Bontemps, as well as a few newcomers, such as Frank Yerby, but she also complained of a lack of good writing from younger authors. The last issue, which appeared in the spring of 1937, acknowledged that Richard Wright and other activists and Communists living in Chicago had criticized the magazine, and she offered them a section of the next issue. Instead, Wright, West, and Marian Minus collaborated in New York on a revamped magazine called New Challenge, with the first issue published that fall. However, financial hardship, philosophical differences over content, and a threat by radical University of Chicago students to take over the magazine led West to discontinue publication.

Although romantically linked to Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Henry Moon and others, West never married or had children. (This latter caused her great sorrow.) After her father's death during the worst of the Great Depression, she had to support herself, but her experience with Challenge had shown her that publishing was not a profitable endeavor. To earn her living, West became a welfare worker in Harlem, a job she held for a year and a half before moving on to the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a Depression-era program that hired writers for various assignments. "Mammy," a story based on her welfare work experience, appeared in Opportunity in October 1940; a memoir she wrote of Wallace Thurman for the FWP would appear as "Elephant's Dance" in Black World in 1970. In the 1940s, she launched a two-decade-long stint of regular short-story writing for the New York Daily News. Her stories typically are brief and simply plotted, often with universal themes that make race irrelevant. Perhaps because both her parents, although they were able to raise West as a proper Bostonian, had come from Southern poverty, the stories depict characters from all strata of society. Despite her publishing success, West also received numerous rejections from magazines that either printed only a small quota of stories about blacks or did not approve of her stories when they were not overtly about blacks. Still, they praised the author's storytelling and writing abilities. "I always said that my rejection letters read like acceptances until the end," West told interviewer Deborah E. McDowell .

West moved to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her family had spent many happy summers, in the mid-1940s. In 1948, her semi-autobiographical novel, The Living Is Easy, was published. It is the story of a domineering woman, Cleo Judson, who ultimately destroys her marriage in an effort to protect and provide for her extended family. The inspiration for the Cleo character seems to have come from West's own mother Rachel, who brought several of her relatives from South Carolina to live with the Wests in their four-story house in Boston and who, as "chief mother," ran the household with an iron will tempered by a tendency to tell funny stories. Literary critic Robert Bone called the work "bitingly ironic" in his book The Negro Novel in America (1958), and Florence Codman , in her Commonweal review, considered the protagonist "a wholly plausible, tantalizing creature." Only years after the book's publication would West recognize Cleo as a feminist. The novel was not roundly welcomed, in part because it appeared at a time when readers were not interested in feminist women and middle-class blacks. Ladies' Home Journal considered serializing it, but decided not to risk losing Southern white subscribers who would object to its depiction of privileged African-American life.

West began a second novel based on the lives of upper-middle-class blacks on Martha's Vineyard, but as the civil-rights protest movement gained strength, she shelved the project, feeling that the timing was not right for this

book either. She feared that revolutionaries, particularly those in the Black Panther movement, would vilify her expression of the view that African-Americans needed elite blacks to serve as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who would also help other less fortunate members of their race. Nevertheless, she continued writing, and many of her stories appeared in the Vineyard Gazette, the local newspaper where she had begun working as a billing clerk. Meanwhile, a summer resident on the island who worked as an editor with the Doubleday publishing firm,Jacqueline Kennedy , began encouraging West to complete her second novel. She eventually did so, and Doubleday published it as The Wedding in 1995. Doubleday also issued The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences that year. Critics praised both books. Susan Kenney , in The New York Times Book Review, wrote of the novel, "It's as though we've been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera, only to find that one great artist is belting out all the parts." Literary historians, critics, and general admirers rediscovered West and her connection to the Harlem Renaissance, and, much to her genial enjoyment (and occasional bemusement), she became greatly sought after for interviews and lectures. A sign outside her home politely requesting "Please no unannounced visitors" was largely ignored by the legions of fans who trooped to her A-frame cottage in Oak Bluffs.

Although West's work features themes of racial mixing, the promises and pitfalls of middle-class values for black people, and love and admiration for African-American men in all their struggles, it also sounds the mother's voice and acknowledges women's strength and influence, notes Mary Helen Washington . In The Living Is Easy, West skewers her own mother's largely successful efforts to manipulate her father and his money for the benefit of her large and needy birth family. But in a brief sketch titled "My Mother, Rachel West," written after her mother's death, West paid tribute to Rachel's lasting legacy. In the essay, West recalled her relatives' relief that her mother, now dead, could no longer meddle in their lives, then considered how often she and her various aunts and cousins quoted her mother and heard the derisive response, "You sound just like Rachel." Eventually, West wrote, the family admitted that the ones "'who sound just like her are the ones who laugh a lot, love children a lot, don't have any hang-ups about race or color, and never give up without trying.' … I suppose that was the day and the hour of our acknowledgment that some part of her was forever embedded in our psyches."

West remained active and continued writing until the end of her long life. She enjoyed the attention garnered by the publication of her second novel, although she occasionally was wearied by the steady stream of admirers whom she was too gracious to turn away. At the time of her death in August 1998, she was working on a history of the African-American community in Martha's Vineyard, having scrupulously followed her own advice to "write, write, write."

sources:

Bambara, Toni Cade. "Golden Age," in The Boston Sunday Globe. July 23, 1995, pp. B37, B40.

Dalsgard, Katrine. "Alive and Well and Living on the Island of Martha's Vineyard: An Interview with Dorothy West," in Langston Hughes Review. Vol. 12, Fall 1993, pp. 28–44.

Ferguson, Sally Ann H. "Dorothy West," in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1988.

Jacobs, Sally. "Dorothy West's Vineyard renaissance," in The Boston Globe. October 11, 1995, pp. 61, 66.

McDowell, Deborah E. "Conversations with Dorothy West," in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. Ed. by Victor A. Kramer. NY: AMS Press, 1987, pp. 265–282.

"Obituary," in The Boston Globe. August 19, 1998, p. C9.

Roses, Lorraine Elena. "Interviews with Black Women Writers: Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts July, 1984," in Sage. Vol. 2. Spring 1985, pp. 47–49.

Skow, John. "The Second Time Around," in Time. July 24, 1995, p. 67.

Steinberg, Sybil. "Dorothy West: Her Own Renaissance," in Publishers Weekly. Vol. 242. July 3, 1995, p. 34.

Washington, Mary Helen, "I Sign My Mother's Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall," in Mothering the Mind. Ed. by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley. NY: Holmes & Meier, 1984, pp. 142–163.

suggested reading:

West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1948 (republished by the Feminist Press, 1981, 1991).

——. The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences. NY: Doubleday, 1995.

——. The Wedding. NY: Doubleday, 1995.

collections:

Papers located in the Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; and an interview in the Black Women's Oral History Project and papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Boston.

related media:

"As I Remember It: A Portrait of Dorothy West" (VHS, 56 mins.), written, produced, and directed by Saleem Merkuria, Merkuria Productions, in association with WGBH, 1991.

"The Wedding" (television miniseries), starring Halle Berry , Eric Thal, and Lynn Whitfield, produced by Oprah Winfrey , first aired in 1998.

Cheryl Knott Malone , University of Texas, Austin, Texas