Digitization at Schlesinger Library

Please visit the finding aid for the Dorothy West collection (Call#: MC 676) for more information and access to the digitized content.

Dorothy West, an African American writer best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 2, 1907. In 1926, West and her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, moved to New York City, where West enrolled in classes at Columbia University's Extension Division. The two young writers became involved in the artistic and intellectual movement known as the Harlem Renaissance; West's friends included such prominent figures as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay. West was one of a group of 22 African American writers invited to the Soviet Union in 1932 to make a film about black life in the United States. After the group arrived, the film was cancelled, but West stayed on in the Soviet Union for several months until she got word in early 1933 that her father had died. After returning to New York, West decided to edit and publish a magazine of contemporary African American writing, Challenge.

Beginning in 1940, West's short stories were often published in the New York Daily News. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, about upper class African Americans in Boston, was published in 1948. Aside from the Daily News, little of her work was published until the late 1960s, when she began to publish autobiographical pieces and stories in the Vineyard Gazette, where she worked as a billing clerk. West wrote a weekly "Oak Bluffs" column for the Vineyard Gazette from 1973 to 1993, and continued to publish longer pieces in the paper. Several collections of her writings have been published posthumously: The Dorothy West Martha's Vineyard (2001), Where the Wild Grape Grows: Selected Writings, 1930-1950 (2005), and The Last Leaf of Harlem (2001).

In great demand by researchers, the Dorothy West Collection began to show the effects of constant use, becoming more and more fragile. In 2011, with support from the Pine Tree Foundation, the collection received a thorough conservation treatment and was digitized. With over 7,000 digitized items documenting the life and writings of Dorothy West, this collection includes drafts, revisions, and documentation of West's travel to Russia. The collection also contains extensive correspondence, including letters from Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Fannie Hurst, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson.