Dorothy West's Paradise

by Sherrard-johnson, Cherene

• ISBN13: 9780813551678
• ISBN10: 0813551676
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-01-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

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 Easyand the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette. Dorothy West’s Paradisecaptures 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.

Author Biography

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Madison where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth century American and African American literature, cultural studies, and feminist theory. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of a new annotated edition of Jessie Redmon Fauset's last novel, Comedy: American-Style, both from Rutgers University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
A "Legend of Oak Bluffs"	p. 22
Childhood Sketches	p. 39
Dorothy West's "Typewriter"	p. 59
To Russia with Love	p. 77
New Challenges	p. 104
The Living Is Easy	p. 123
Cottager's Corner	p. 147
Two Weddings	p. 167
Coda: "Winter on Martha's Vineyard"	p. 185
Notes	p. 189
Bibliography	p. 213
Index	p. 221
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