Novelist, journalist Dorothy West was the The Kid of the Harlem Renaissance.
Dorothy West took an era with her when she died at 91 on August 16, 1998. She was the last living member of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes called her "The Kid" because she was the youngest member of that talented group of writers.
She began writing as a young girl in Boston and, before she was 20, West had won several prizes for her short stories. In a competition sponsored by Opportunity, the Urban League's influential publication, West's story "The Typewriter" came in second place after the winning story by Zora Neale Hurston.
With her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, West left her family's middle-class home to live in Harlem. There she became acquainted with Hughes, Hurston, McKay, and other Harlem Renaissance writers. Poet Countee Cullen proposed to her, but West never married.
In 1929, she got a part as an extra in a London production of Porgy and then visited the Soviet Union. When her father died during her travels, she returned home to Boston to be with her mother but was back in Harlem soon after.
She founded Challenge, a journal that featured the older Harlem Renaissance writers. However, due to lack of funding and poor quality-these writers did not contribute their best work-West folded Challenge after five issues.
In 1937, she began publishing New Challenge with an impressive editorial list that included Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Margaret Walker, Sterling Brown, Ralph Ellison, and others. Unfortunately, New Challenge lasted only for one issue. Apparently, West felt that the Chicago group of Left-leaning authors, which included Richard Wright, were taking over her journal. So she ended it.
The Living Is Easy, West's first novel, was published in 1948, well after the peak of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. This partly autobiographical novel is centered on the Judson family. The well-off Judsons deal with the issues of African-American society in Boston. But they are not the model of the happy, middle-class family. The manipulative wife, Cleo, wants more than her husband, Bartholomew can provide. The result is a strained family relationship.
Later, Dorothy West moved to Martha's Vineyard where she wrote a column for the local newspaper. Her neighbor and book editor at Doubleday, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, encouraged West to finish another novel, The Wedding, which was published in 1995-almost 50 years since her first novel. Later that year, West's collection of short stories and nonfiction-The Richer, The Poorer-was published. In 1998, Oprah Winfrey produced a television miniseries of The Wedding.
