West, Dorothy

Source:

 African American National Biography

West, Dorothy

(2 June 1907–16 Aug. 1998),

writer and editor, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of Rachel Pease Benson of Camden, South Carolina, and Isaac Christopher West, an enterprising former slave from Virginia who was a generation his wife's senior. Nicknamed the “Black Banana King” before his prosperous wholesale fruit business failed during the Depression, Isaac West provided his gifted daughter with a privileged, bourgeois upbringing. Dorothy's formal education began at the age of two when she took private lessons from Bessie Trotter, sister of the Boston Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter. Young Dorothy grew up in a four-story house in Boston with a large extended family made up of her mother's numerous siblings and their children. Although Dorothy tested at the second-grade level at age four, Rachel West insisted that her precocious daughter enter first grade at Boston's Farragut School. Years later West recalled, “When I was a child of four or five, listening to the conversation of my mother and her sisters, I would sometimes intrude on their territory with a solemnly stated opinion that would jerk their heads in my direction, then send them into roars of uncontrollable laughter…. [T]he first adult who caught her breath would speak for them all and say ‘That's no child. That's a sawed-off woman’” (West, The Richer). Dorothy finished her elementary education in the racist environment of the Martin School located in the city's heavily Irish Mission District, graduated from Girls' Latin School in 1923, and later took courses at Columbia University, where she studied creative writing.

Dorothy always thought of herself as a short-story writer and began her literary career at age seven when, she said, “I wrote a story about a little Chinese girl, though … I'm sure I had never seen a Chinese girl in my life” (McDowell, 267). From about age ten into her early teens, she regularly won the weekly short-story contest sponsored by the Boston Post. The Post published her first story, “Promise and Fulfillment,” when Dorothy was ten, and the paper's African American short-story editor, Eugene Gordon, encouraged her to join the Saturday Evening Quill Club, a black writers group. In response to a story submission, Cosmopolitan's editor Ray Long—convinced that the writer was a forty-year-old spinster who knew nothing about love—wrote the fourteen-year-old Dorothy a scathing letter asserting that his magazine “had one Fanny Hurst and so didn't need another” (McDowell, 268). Far from discouraging her, however, this rejection had the opposite effect on Dorothy.

In 1925, shortly before turning eighteen, West entered a short-story competition sponsored jointly by The Crisis and Opportunity, the publications of the NAACP and the Urban League respectively. Her submission, “The Typewriter,” tied for second place with Zora Neale Hurston's “Muttsy” and was subsequently published in the July 1926 issue of Opportunity. West was then able to convince her family that she had the talent to launch a literary career in New York City alongside Harlem Renaissance stalwarts.

Almost immediately West's stories began to appear in print. “Hannah Byde,” published in The Messenger (July 1926), was one of the earliest pieces of African American literature to use a jazz motif to explore the spiritual discord of urban life. Over the next few years she published “Prologue to a Life,” “Funeral,” and “An Unimportant Man.” These early stories feature West's lifetime preoccupation with the ways in which children interact with and affect the adult world around them. They are suffused with West's characteristically ironic tone, inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevski, who, she said, “became my master, though I knew I would never write like him” (McDowell, 268). “Nine out of ten stories I write are real,” West later said, of her keen observations of family, friends, and social milieus. “I change the situation, but they are something that really happened” (Dalsgard, 37).

When Hurston left New York, West and her cousin Helene Johnson, with financial help from West's father, took over her apartment. West continued to write short stories, although, for a variety of reasons, including the discontinuation of Opportunity's writing contests in 1927, few were published, leaving the young writer dissatisfied with her literary prospects. In 1927 West and her new friend Wallace Thurman won minor roles in the stage production of Porgy and Bess, and her weekly earnings of seventeen and a half dollars helped keep her in New York during hard economic times. In June 1932 West sailed for the Soviet Union, along with twenty-two other African Americans including Langston Hughes, who had been commissioned to revise a movie script about black American life titled “Black and White.” When the project fell through, West—and Hughes—remained in the Soviet Union for nearly a year, until word arrived that her father had died.

A more responsible, twenty-five-year-old West returned to New York in 1933, regretful that she had not lived up to her earlier artistic promise. Only “Funeral” and “The Black Dress” were published during the 1930s, although she produced the nonfiction pieces “Ghost Story,” “Pluto,” “Temple of Grace,” and “Cocktail Party” while working for the Depression-era Federal Writer's Project, part of the Works Progress Administration.

In 1933, in an attempt to revitalize the Harlem Renaissance movement by providing an outlet for black authors, West founded Challenge Magazine, of which she published five issues. Under the pseudonym of Mary Christopher, West published her own work and that of Hughes, Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, Countée Cullen, and Pauli Murray. The last issue appeared in June 1936, when Richard Wright virtually took West's journal away from her. Wright wanted to shift the journal's focus toward a more socially conscious protest literature, a direction West found uncomfortable but against which she offered little resistance. As she explained later, unlike modern women, she was too passive, petite, and soft-spoken to stand up to Wright, his friends, and his lawyer, “who sent me a form to sign giving Wright the rights to something, I can't remember” (McDowell, 272). Moreover, she presumed Wright was acting as a pawn of communists. “I was never crazy about Richard Wright because he was too timid and afraid of white people. I guess it stemmed from his southern background” (McDowell, 272).

Dorothy West, photographed at her home in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, 20 January 1995. (AP Images.)

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West's own dry spell came to an end on 29 September 1940, when the New York Daily News published “Jack in the Pot,” a story that captured the economic and spiritual strife of the Depression. For the next twenty years she wrote two short stories per month for the Daily News, a job that kept her writing and able to pay her bills. In the mid-1940s West left New York and moved to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard, the summer playground of her youth. There she wrote her first novel, the semiautobiographical The Living Is Easy (1948). The novel, a family drama told through the eyes of young Judy Judson, includes West's examination of black middle-class social pretensions in Boston. The novel was generally well-received although, in a move that deeply affected West, Ladies Home Journal eventually decided against serializing the book, which it felt might offend southern readers. When the Feminist Press reprinted The Living Is Easy in 1982, West was introduced to a whole new generation.

In the late 1960s West began a new novel, “Where the Wild Grape Grows.” Although she had financial support from a Mary Roberts Rinehart grant and a Harper and Row contract, she stopped work on the book, feeling that black revolutionary politics conflicted with her theme of miscegenation. Instead, she resigned herself to writing for the Vineyard Gazette, focusing on countering the impression that the only blacks on Martha's Vineyard were in work uniforms. At first her “Cottagers Corner” columns showcased prosperous and affluent black families and their prominent friends and visitors. Later, she began to write more broadly, about people, places, and island happenings, even contributing sketches to the Gazette's bird column. Her last piece appeared on 13 August 1993, when she left the paper to devote herself full time to completing the novel The Wedding, incorporating much of the earlier “Where the Wild Grape Grows” into it.

In the early 1990s, after reading West's Gazette articles, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis helped West secure a book contract for The Wedding. The novel, about the spiritual price of assimilation and miscegenation, was published in 1995 and became a best-seller, drawing yet another generation to the door of the woman who became known as the sole survivor of the Harlem Renaissance. West's book, which centers on the wedding preparations of Shelby Coles, ends with a child's death and without a wedding, though Doubleday sent out review copies of the novel with an ending Dorothy West had not written. When this was discovered in the fall of 1994, the Harvard professor of African American studies, Henry Louis Gates Jr., championed her cause, and Doubleday delayed publication until West's own final chapter could be included. Unfortunately, a number of reviewers had already published their assessments of the novel with the spurious ending. In 1998 Oprah Winfrey produced a television adaptation of the novel starring Halle Berry which transformed the story into a sentimental tale in which Shelby heads down the aisle with few racial concerns and which the critic John Leonard called “Soap Oprah.”

West died at age ninety-one in 1998 in Boston. Her many short stories, two prominent novels, and nonfiction articles distinguish a literary career of eight decades that, in the final analysis, reflected the many expectations, failures, and achievements of its times.

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