Dorothy+West

Dorothy West. She was an author and journalist, her work was known during the Harlem Renaissance. There is a vast disparity in the exact year in which she was born. Many articles state different years of her birth being. Most of the information has stated 1907. West was the child of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac Christopher West. Dorothy West was born on June 2, 1907 in Boston, Massachusetts. West met and married the older Isaac West, a former slave from Virginia who lived first in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he opened an ice cream parlor and food store, then in Boston, where he owned a wholesale fruit company and became known as the "Black Banana King" of Boston (Smith 1238-40). Her formal education began at age two under the tutelage of Bessie Trotter, sister of Monroe Nathan Trotter, then editor of the //Boston Guardian.// At the age of four West entered the Farragut School in Boston and was capable of doing the work of a second grader. Her elementary education was completed at Matin School in Boston's Mission District. She began writing short stories at the tender age of seven. Her first short story, "Promise and Fulfillment," was published in the //Boston Globe,// a paper for which West became a regular contributor and that awarded her several literary prizes. After graduating from Girl's Latin High School in 1923, West continued her education at Boston University and later the Columbia University School of Journalism. West became a welfare investigator in Harlem for one and a half years after her two magazines folded due to financial difficulties. Later she joined the Federal Writers Project of the Works in Progress Administration until its demise in the 1940's. West never ceased writing during this period. Several of her short stories were published, such as "Hannah Byde:, "An Unimportant Man", "Prologue to a Life", and "The Black Dress." West died on August 20, 1998, in Oak Bluffs, a Martha's Vineyard town where she had lived since 1947. Dorothy West was 91 years old ("Died: Dorothy West" 49).

"Dorothy West." //Current Biography// 58.2 (Feb. 1997): 50-4. Hine, Darlene., ed. //Black Women in America.// Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1993. Smith, Jessie., ed. //Notable Black American Women.// Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

BOOKS AND ACTING.... She just didnt writie, West pursued acting. In 1927 she had a small role in the original stage production of //Porgy// (based on [|Dubose Heyward]'s novel) and in 1932 she accompanied [|Langston Hughes] and a group of black intellectuals and artists to the [|Soviet Union] to make a film about race relations in the South. The film was never made and West returned to the United States. While she was in New York, she met some of the brightest black artists and writers in the country. She also developed a friendship with H. L. Mencken. She starting up acting, and she ended up touring with a production of //Porgy and Bess//. Writing was her life she always returned to writing.She formed friendships with black poets, [|Langston Hughes] and [|Countee Cullen], unknowingly her group of friends,she was the younges gOing into the Harlem Renaissance. Most of the writered group wrote about the working class, West focused on the social divisions well-to-do blacks created based on wealth and skin color.


 * WORK CITED**
 * "Dorothy West," //African American Literature Book Club//, http://authors.aalbc.com/dorothy.htm (October 11, 2005).
 * "Dorothy West," //Poets and Writers//, http://www.pw.org/mag/West.htm (October 11, 2005).