African American Women Writers

This stunning first novel by the author of The Wedding is one of only a handful of novels published by black women during the 1940s. It tells the story of Cleo Judson--daughter of southern sharecroppers and wife of "Black Banana King" Bart Judson. Cleo seeks to recreate her original family by urging her sisters and their children to live with her, while rearing her daughter to be a member of Boston's black elite.

On the heels of the bestseller success of hernbsp;nbsp;novel The Wedding, Dorothy West,nbsp;nbsp;the last surviving member of the Harlemnbsp;nbsp;Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories thatnbsp;nbsp;explore both the realism of everyday life, and thenbsp;nbsp;fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of onenbsp;nbsp;woman's life in a mythic time. Traversing thenbsp;nbsp;universal themes and conflicts between poverty andnbsp;nbsp;prosperity, men and women, and young and old, andnbsp;nbsp;compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,nbsp;nbsp;The Richer, The Poorer not onlynbsp;nbsp;affords an unparalleled window into thenbsp;nbsp;African-American middle class, but also delves into thenbsp;nbsp;richness of experience of "one of the finest writersnbsp;nbsp;produced in this country during the Roaringnbsp;nbsp;Twenties"(Book Page).

Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu--Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha's Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community. In the years between publishing her two novels, 1948's The Living is Easy and the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette. Dorothy West's Paradise captures the scope of the author's long life and career, reading it alongside the unique cultural geography of Oak Bluffs and its history as an elite African American enclave--a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. An essential book for both fans of West's fiction and students of race, class, and American women's lives, Dorothy West's Paradise offers an intimate biography of an important author and a privileged glimpse into the society that shaped her work.

Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel, The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author's first bestseller. Literary Sisters reveals a different side of West's personal and professional lives--her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her "literary sisters"--women like Zora Neale Hurston and West's cousin, poet Helene Johnson--created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works.