Dorothy West
Dorothy West, born in Boston in 1907, moved to New York City in 1925 at the age of 18 and became the youngest among a group of artists and writers working in the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes nicknamed her “the kid.”
![Portrait of Dorothy West, seated in chair on a deck](https://radcliffe-harvard-edu.imgix.net/2986f765-1cbe-48d1-bc69-dc37bd84055c/black-women-oral-history-project-records_Schlesinger_olvwork570612.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&q=80&rect=0%2C249%2C3478%2C3477)
West published her first story at the age of fourteen, in the Boston Post. In 1926, she and Zora Neale Hurston tied for second place in a contest sponsored by the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine. The next year, West had a bit part in the play Porgy and toured with it for a couple of years. In 1932, she traveled to Russia with 20 other African Americans to make a film on American racism. The film was never made, but she stayed in Russia for a year.
During the Depression, West worked for the Federal Writers Project. From the fall of 1940 until the 1960s, she earned money writing two short stories a month for the New York Daily News. In the mid-1940s she moved to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard and regularly wrote a column for the Vineyard Gazette. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, was published in 1948. Her second novel, The Wedding, was not published until 1995. West died in 1998.