Dorothy West Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Skow

Critical Essay by John Skow

SOURCE: “The Second Time Around,” in Time, July 24, 1995, p. 67.

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, 88-year-old brown woman writer who lives and works—and these days amiably inscribes books and serves tea to a procession of admiring visitors—in the upper-middle-class African-American community of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. Brown is her word, used carefully and with mild amusement, because among the Massachusetts resort island's summering black aristocracy, light has always been right, and shadings of color are measured with precision. When West was a child, as she relates in The Richer, the Poorer her new collection of stories and reminiscences, her extended family included cousins “pink and gold and brown and ebony,” and her light-skinned, lighthearted mother used to say, “Come on, children,...
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