- Dorothy West (b. 1907), one of the youngest of the writers drawn to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, first came to New York in 1926 because she had won “some little prize in Opportunity” for her short story “The Typewriter.” Additional short stories (which she considers the perfect literary form) appeared in Opportunity, The Messenger, Boston Post, and Saturday Evening Quill during the 1920s. In 1934 she founded and edited Challenge, a literary journal, “to permit new Negroes to make themselves heard,” and in 1937 she edited a reincarnation of that quarterly, New Challenge. Her important novel, The Living Is Easy, was published in 1948 and reissued in 1982. For a number of years, she wrote a weekly column for the Vineyard Gazette. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard in Oak Bluffs.
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