English: Biography: To our knowledge, Dorothy West is the only living writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Boston, the only child of Isaac Christopher and Rachel Benson West, she has pursued a literary career spanning 60 years. Demonstrating an early interest in writing, she had completed her first story by the age of seven, and by the age of ten was regularly winning prizes from the Boston Post for her stories. When she was nineteen she won second prize for an essay submitted to Opportunity magazine. She studied at Girls' High School (Boston), Boston University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. When she lived in New York, she became involved with the many writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians who made up the intellectual and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten encouraged her writing, and George Bye, a literary agent, helped her get stories published in New York magazines and in the Daily News. Miss West has worked as an actress, a social work investigator in Harlem, and as editor of two Black quarterlies published in the thirties, Challenge and New Challenge. She was among a group of twenty writers, including Ted Poston and Langston Hughes, who were invited by the Soviet Union to go there to make a film on Black life in the United States. Her novel The Living Is Easy was published in 1948 and reissued in 1982. Langston Hughes included her stories in his 1967 anthology, The Best Short Stories of Negro Writers. Residing in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard for the past 20 years, she works as a cashier in a restaurant, writes a weekly column for the Vineyard Gazette, and continues to work on her novels and short stories.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick
Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Collection: Black Women Oral History Project

Research Guide: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp