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.
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