Dorothy West Summary

Although her literary career spans over fifty years, Dorothy West has not received the critical attention her contributions to black American literature merit. Too often critics devote only a few para... Read more

In the following review, Codman favorably reviews The Living Is Easy shortly after its publication. Richard Wright's and Ralph Ellison's violent accounts of Negro life in this country... Read more

In the following excerpt from his book The Contemporary Negro Novel, Bone emphasizes the biting satire of The Living Is Easy while pointing to some flaws in West's narrative structure. The L... Read more

In the following excerpt, Washington examines the effect of West's mother's attitudes on The Living Is Easy and discusses how the protagonist Cleo is frustrated as a woman in her particu... Read more

In the following essay, a psychological study of the protagonists of The Living Is Easy and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Reuschmann argues that the relationship between Cleo and her sisters... Read more

In the following essay, Skow discusses West's revived literary fame in the mid-1990s and offers brief comments on The Richer, the Poorer and The Wedding. Dorothy west is a tiny, talkative, 8... Read more