Dorothy West

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Dorothy West at her desk (1981)

Dorothy West (born June 2, 1907 in Boston , † August 16, 1998 in Boston) was an American writer . She is an important representative of the Harlem Renaissance and was considered to be its youngest, later as the last surviving member. Dorothy West is best known for her novels The Living Is Easy and The Wedding and as a short story writer . Her stories mostly take place in the upper class of their time and are characterized by a critical and sometimes satirical view of the black upper class of the American east coast.

life and work

Dorothy West was the only daughter of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac Christopher West. Her father, who was born into slavery , had made some prosperity as a fruit and vegetable dealer. Dorothy grew up in Boston with her numerous cousins.

Dorothy West began writing as a child. At age 14, she published her first short story, Promise and Fulfillment , in the Boston Post . At the age of 20 she won her first award for her short story The Typewriter . Writer Edward J. O'Brien selected the story for the anthology he edited, The Best Short Stories of 1926 .

Dorothy West attended Girls' Latin School and began studying at Boston University when she was 16 . She later attended Columbia University School of Journalism . Inspired by the artistic movement of the Harlem Renaissance, West moved to Harlem at the age of 17 and joined the group of African-American artists she admired . As its youngest member, she was nicknamed "the kid".

In 1932 she lived in the Soviet Union for a year to shoot a documentary with Langston Hughes , which was never finished. In order to promote the literary culture of her country, which was restricted by the Great Depression , she founded the literary magazine Challenge in 1934 , which published texts by young black authors. Neither this nor the successor magazine New Challenge , founded in 1937, was able to hold its own in the economic crisis, and both had to cease operations after a few years. From 1940 to 1960 West regularly published short stories in the New York Daily News . Her first novel, The Living Is Easy , was published in 1948. It is a satirical depiction of the life of the black upper class of Boston and has autobiographical features.

West's family owned a vacation home on Martha's Vineyard Island , where Dorothy West lived permanently from 1947. She wrote columns there for The Vineyard Gazette and resumed work on her second novel, which she had begun writing 20 years earlier. During this time she became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis , who visited her frequently and encouraged her to complete the novel. The novel, published in 1995, is entitled The Wedding and is dedicated to the memory of Jackie Kennedy. It is about the life of the black population of Martha's Vineyard and deals with racial discrimination as well as prejudice and exclusion within the black community.

She was featured prominently in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby in London and New York in 1992 .

Dorothy West lived on Martha's Vineyard until the end of her life. She died at the age of 91.

Works

  • The living is easy . 1948.
  • The Wedding . 1995.
  • The Richer, The Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences . 1995.
  • The Dorothy West Martha's Vineyard. Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette , edited by James Rober Saunders and Renae Nadine Shackelford. 2001.

Awards

In 1996 Dorothy West received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

filming

Charles Burnett filmed The Wedding in 1998 as a television two-parter of the same name with Halle Berry in the lead role.

literature

  • Cherene Sherrard-Johnson: Dorothy West's Paradise. A Biography of Class and Color. Rutgers University Press, Piscataway 2012, ISBN 978-0-8135-5166-1 .
  • Verner D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis: Literary Sisters. Dorothy West and Her Circle. A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2012, ISBN 978-0-8135-5145-6 .

Web links

Commons : Dorothy West  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Pearlie Mae Peters: Dorothy West (1907–1988). In: Yolanda Williams Page (Ed.): Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers. Greenwood Press, Westport 2007, ISBN 978-0-3133-3429-0 , pp. 606-609.
  2. ^ A b c d e Andrew L. Yarrow: Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance Writer, Dies at 91. In: The New York Times . August 19, 1998, accessed July 23, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b https://www. britica.com/biography/Dorothy-West
  4. ^ Cary D. Wintz, Paul Finkelman: Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. K-Y. Routledge, New York 2004, pp. 1246-1248.
  5. ↑ The Wedding in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME West, Dorothy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1998
Place of death Boston