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 paragraphs to her critically acclaimed novel, The Living...

Dorothy West remembers the moment she wanted to become a writer. She was a reclusive girl, holed up in her third-floor room reading Dostoyevsky. "This is genius," she remembers saying out loud. Now 83, strong in memory and opinion, she looks back on...

Staff reporter Brian McGrory contributed to this report. OAK BLUFFS -- While President Clinton golfed yesterday afternoon, one of the most joyous gatherings of the Vineyard summer, or any summer anywhere for that matter, occurred just a few miles away at the Union Chapel...

In the following essay, Rodgers attempts to deconstruct the image of West's The Living Is Easy as outside the mainstream of twentieth-century African-American literature, instead placing this middle-class novel within the context of southern Afrocentric values.

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 is central to an understanding of her complex character.

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 particular milieu.