Dorothy West

Dorothy West born on June 2, 1907 in Boston, Massachusetts was a storyteller and short story writer who became famous during the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, as well as many other short stories and essays, about the life of an upper-class black family.

West wrote her first story at the age of seven. Her first published work, a short story entitled "Promise and Fulfillment", appeared in The Boston Post when she was 14 years old. West attended Boston University and the Columbia University School of Journalism.

In 1926, she tied for second place in a writing contest sponsored by Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League, with her short story "The Typewriter". The person West tied with was novelist Zora Neale Hurston. "The Typewriter” appeared in Dodd Mead's annual anthology The Best Short Stories of 1926 alongside work by Ernest Hemingway.

Dorothy West moved to Harlem and became a founding member of the Harlem Renaissance, along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Wallace Thurman. Hughes gave West the nickname of "The Kid”.

During the Great Depression, West's published the magazine Challenge, which she founded with $40 in 1934. She also published the magazine's shortlived successor, New Challenge, which published Richard Wright's groundbreaking essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing”. In 1947 where is she wrote her first novel, The Living Is Easy. For the next four decades, West worked as a journalist, primarily writing for a small newspaper on Martha's Vineyard.

In 1982, The Feminist Press brought The Living Is Easy back into print, giving new attention to West and as a result of this renewed attention, at the age of 85 West finally finished a second novel, entitled The Wedding. The novel was a best-seller and resulted in Oprah Winfrey's production company turned the novel into a two-part television miniseries, The Wedding in 1998. Two years before she died, West won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. West died on August 16, 1998, at the age of 91.