Rediscovering Dorothy West - contributions of novelist and short story writer to literature by African American women

American Visions, April-May, 1993 by Dorothy A. Clark

An insightful observer recognized in 1925 that the efforts of African-American can women hold special significance: "The Negro woman's culture has once more begun to flower. After the long, quiescent period, following the harvest from the pen of Phillis Wheatley, Negro women dramatists, poets and novelists are enjoying a vogue in print. There is every prospect that the Negro woman will enrich American literature and art with stylistic portrayal of her experience and her problems," wrote teacher and journalist Elise Johnson McDougald. Today there is again a burgeoning interest in the works and lives of African-American female writers, an interest that is more than curiosity. It is an urgent demand for the acknowledgment of the contributions black women have made to a long and distinctive tradition of literary expression.

There is one woman alive who has played an active part in both the movement of the 1920s and today's resurgence. Novelist and short-story writer Dorothy West followed such luminaries as Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and many others who began their careers in the 1920s, an era marked by a heightened racial awareness and affirmation, when young African-American intellectuals, artists and writers christened themselves "New Negroes" and ushered in a vibrant cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

When West left Boston, her hometown, in 1926 for Harlem, the enterprising teenager joined a coterie of older writers who had made their entrances upon the scene a few years before. It was a daring move for one so young, but it was typical of West, who courted challenges most women her age eschewed. "She had enough faith in herself that she could write," says Adelaide M. Cromwell, professor emerita and founder of Boston University's Afro-American Studies Center. "She was a woman with an awful lot of guts, perception and savvy. "

Her talent and vivacious personality enabled West to assert her presence among the Harlem literati. Her ability to make a grand impression, which contrasted profoundly with her elfin stature, made West an endeared addition to the ranks of the New Negro movement. Her formal installation came after winning a short-story prize in 1926 in a national competition sponsored by the Urban League's Opportunity magazine.

"Oh, I remember that," West says, "because I had to split it with Zora Neale Hurston." West's story, "The Typewriter," tied for second place with Hurston's "Muttsy." Hurston harbored some resentment about having to share the prize, and their initial relationship was a chilly one. "It took her a long time to like me," West says, but the wait was worth the friendship. "She was funny from the time she woke up in the morning."

West's participation in the Harlem Renaissance not only adds to her significance as an African-American writer but also is the foundation that encouraged her to pursue her ambitions and take advantage of exciting opportunities. In 1932, she traveled to Russia with a group of 25 black Americans, including Langston Hughes, to make a Communist Party-supported film about the plight of blacks in America. The film, to be titled Black and White, was barely into production before the project was abandoned, blocked by a white American in Russia who disapproved of a film portraying white America's poor treatment of blacks.

When West returned to the United States, the Harlem Renaissance was over, its decline brought about by the Depression and the exodus from New York City of its key figures. West saw the need for a progressive forum for the remaining black voices as well as new ones. In 1934 she single-handedly founded the journal Challenge, and in 1937, with Richard Wright as associate editor, she started New Challenge. Both journals were dedicated to the prose and poetry of new African-American voices, featuring essays by political and social activists. Through these short-lived publications, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker and Pauli Murray received some of their earliest exposure.

Since Harlem had lost its hold as the anchor community for the African-American elite, West moved on. During the Depression, she worked as a welfare relief social investigator and with the Works Progress Administration Writers' Project. Following that, her longest assignment was as a short-story writer for the New York Daily News, beginning in 1940, when the newspaper accepted a story West had written for its Sunday Blue Ribbon Fiction page. For more than 25 years, West wrote two short stories every month for the newspaper.

She never married, but that wasn't because there were no suitors to tender proposals. Countee Cullen, who courted West and proposed marriage, was neither the first, nor the last. "I was afraid to get married," West says. "I thought I wouldn't be a good wife." A submissive spouse, no, A creative crusader, yes.

"I knew I wanted to write when I was 7 years old," she says. She gave expression to her aspiration by writing vignettes about her family, a well-to-do household ensconced in the black bourgeoisie of Boston. Her father, freed from slavery at age 7 with emancipation, was a successful entrepreneur in the produce business. His status-conscious wife, a generation his junior, was one of 19 children born to a poor family in South Carolina. West, their only child, portrayed aspects of her parents in the two central characters of The Living Is Easy (Arno Press, 1969), her roman a clef set in Boston's middle-class black community.