SOURCE: “I Sign My Mother's Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Pauline Marshall,” in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley, Holmes & Meier, 1984, pp. 142-63.

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.

… On the island of Martha's Vineyard in February of 1980, I interviewed Dorothy West, who provided the most immediate and dramatic account of a woman discovering her voice through the mediation of a female power—her mother. Somewhere around 1926, when West was not yet twenty years old, she went to New York and became a part of the group of younger Harlem Renaissance writers which consisted of Wallace Thurman, Zora Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, and Langston Hughes. West describes herself...