Dorothy West Biography

American novelist, born in Boston, the daughter of a successful black businessman; she was educated at the city's Girls' Latin School and studied journalism at Columbia University. Her first published story appeared in the Boston Post in 1928. She moved to New York in 1929, where she became a notable figure in the circle of black writers associated with Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes (see Harlem Renaissance) and founded Challenge magazine in 1935 as a forum for black writing during the Depression. Her novel The Living Is Easy appeared in 1948. Set in Boston in the years before the First World War, its richly detailed narrative reflects the uneasy hold on social status and prosperity among the black middle-class community.