Dorothy West

I wanted to introduce a new part of my blog highlighting authors, and perhaps revealing interesting facts most of us did not know. For my first author, I wanted it to be a woman, and specifically a woman of color, as the brutality and injustice happening in our nation is vile and a disgrace. Therefore, meet Dorothy West, a woman who also used her words to draw attention to social reform.

I chose Dorothy as her birthday would have happened soon (June 2, 1907), and she was one of the few female literary voices during the Harlem Renaissance.

She was the only child born to parents Isaac Christopher West and Rachel Pease Benson in Boston, Massachusetts. Isaac was born into slavery, but was granted his freedom at the age of seven. He went on to become a very successful businessman, elevating the family’s socioeconomic status to the upper middle class. Rachel was one of twenty-two children, so though Dorothy was an only child, she enjoyed time with numerous cousins growing up, such as Helene Johnson, who later become a famous black poet. Her affluent upbringing led to her having a private tutor from the age of two and access to the most prestigious schools. She also enjoyed time at the family’s summer vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Dorothy began writing at the age of seven, and her first work, “Promise and Fulfillment”, a short story, was published in the Boston Post when she was fourteen years old. She submitted her work to various writing competitions and earned numerous awards. In 1926, she entered a contest by the National Urban League, where her piece “The Typewriter”, tied for second place with the amazing Zora Neale Huston.

Just before this significant win, Dorothy moved with her cousin Helene to Harlem in New York. There she fell in with other members of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, thanks to Zora Neale Huston’s influence. Langston Hughes himself gave her the nickname “The Kid” as she was the youngest of their set. She was later quoted as saying:

We didn’t know it was the Harlem Renaissance, because we were all young and poor.

Though perhaps not as poor as her peers thanks to her family, Dorothy struggled to support herself independently. She enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Dorothy published two stories during the 1920’s in the black publication The Saturday Evening Quill.

To make ends meet, Dorothy began acting, earning a role as extra in the original production of Porgy and Bess. After staying with the production for numerous years, she joined other members of the Harlem Renaissance in Russia to make a film about racism in the United States. Though the film never came to fruition, the extended time with Langston Hughes resulted in Dorothy asking him to marry her. He declined.

She returned to the United States soon after, due to learning of the death of her father. Upon her return, the Great Depression had its grip on the country, and her father had sadly left his business broke. Dorothy, in 1934, having no backing from her deceased father and making little on her literary career, invested her forty dollars of savings into creating a new literary magazine, Challenge, whose aim was to discover and celebrate new, black talent. Unfortunately, it mostly celebrated authors already established in her circle, and folded after three years. Trying to start New Challenge, a periodical to take place of its predecessor in 1937, resulted in only one issue before the same result.

After these failures, Dorothy took a position with the Works Projects Administration Writer’s Project, was a social worker in Harlem, and began a decades long relationship with the New York Daily News. She retreated to the family home in Martha’s Vineyard in 1947 to work on her novel. In 1948, The Living is Easy was published to critical acclaim, but sadly not commercial. Dorothy then began writing for the Martha Vineyard’s Gazette.

Between articles, Dorothy began to revisit a manuscript she had started in the twenties. The fact that she was working on another novel came to the notice of one Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, yes that Jackie O, who had a home on Martha’s Vineyard and also happened to be a book editor at Doubleday. Jackie encouraged Dorothy to finish the book as Doubleday was interested in its publication. Though she died before it occurred, The Wedding was published in 1995 and Dorothy dedicated it to the former first lady. This met with critical and commercial success, with Oprah turning it into a two-part miniseries on TV.

Dorothy died on August 16 of 1998, at the age of ninety one. She passed at Boston Hospital, presumably from natural causes, though official cause was never released. Previously the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, she died never having wed nor having children. Her works are featured in many anthologies posthumously. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said:

That I hung in there. That I didn’t say I can’t.

Sources

• Wikipedia “Dorothy West”
• Britannica.com
• Encyclopedia of World Biographies (notablebiographies.com)