People like Dorothy West

Dorothy West (June 2, 1907 – August 16, 1998) was an American storyteller and short story writer during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, as well as many other short stories and essays, about the life of an upper-class black family.

Dorothy West was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 2, 1907, the only child of Virginian Isaac Christopher West, who was enslaved at birth and became a successful businessman, and Rachel Pease Benson of Camden, South Carolina, one of 22 children. The poet Helene Johnson was her cousin. Late in life she wrote that in Boston Blacks "were taught very young to take the white man in stride or drown in their own despair". She detailed how her mother guided her and her many cousins, all with varied skin tones, into the inhospitable world: