The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard: Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette [Paperback]

Dorothy West (Author), Renae Nadine Shackelford (Author), James Robert Saunders (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0786408928 | ISBN-13: 978-0786408924 | Publication Date: January 2001

This book is a compilation of selected stories, essays, and reminiscences that Dorothy West wrote for the Vineyard Gazette from the 1960s to the early 1990s. In these entries, West retraces life on the island as she experienced it from 1908, when she was an infant, to 1993 when she wrote her final column. Born in 1907 in Boston, Dorothy West went on to develop into a prize-winning author by the time she was in her teens. The 1926 award she received in New York, and the lure of the city itself, inspired West to leave Boston and join what was then a fledgling literary movement that would evolve into the Harlem Renaissance. She circulated among what in essence was the black literary "royalty" of her times, of which she was a signal member. By the mid-1940s West had returned to Massachusetts, to Martha's Vineyard. She began to write a column for the local paper about the comings and goings of island residents and visitors. It was her column in the Gazette that drew the attention of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who, on one of her island visits, met the author and expressed her admiration. Onassis, at the time, just happened to be an editor at Doubleday. When Onassis learned of a decades-old manuscript that had been laid aside, she urged West to pick up the work again. West later dedicated this book "To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners." The authors selected from the Gazette columns that West wrote over the three decades, those on people, events, and nature that seemed to have the greatest historic, artistic, or philosophical import.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Robert Saunders is a professor of English at Purdue University. He is also the author of Tightrope Walk: Identity, Survival and the Corporate World in African American Literature (1997, $29.95). Renae Nadine Shackelford is a lecturer in the Department of English at Purdue University. Together they authored Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia (1998, $29.95).

Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: Mcfarland & Co Inc Pub (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786408928
• ISBN-13: 978-0786408924
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #934,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Poor Excuse for a Book, May 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard: Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette (Paperback)

Ever since her rediscovery, Dorothy West, who recently passed away, has been rightly hailed as the last living writer of the Harlem Renaissance, an important author who focused on middle-class African American lives in the mid-twentieth century, and an artist of the first rank whose career was tragically put on hold for a number of reasons having to do with canonization, race, and sexism. This allegedly scholarly collection purports to bring us her writings during her nearly 40-year absence from the public stage, when she lived on Martha's Vineyard and wrote for the local paper. But the collection is hastily assembled according to no discernible guiding principles (other than, of course, to take advantage of the West revival and to make a buck). There is a perfunctory introduction that lacks insight and introduces nothing, and that also has no attributions to the serious scholarship on West that it borrows from but does not bother to acknowledge. There is no scholarly apparatus, nor annotations nor footnotes, nothing that is remotely helpful for either the student of West or for the interested non-scholar. The book seems to have been produced in as much time as it took these editors to grab a bunch of West's many columns, type them into a word processor, and send them off to a third-rate press that will publish anything. ... West is a terrific writer; she deserved a lot better than to have her unpublished material looted for profit.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, February 22, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard: Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette (Paperback)

I love reading history and am a loyal fan of black women authors, but this book is way too expensive! Would rather check it out from the library than own it.