The Wedding by Dorothy West

The Wedding by Dorothy West

In her final novel, Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of blue-vein society, we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions. Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.

With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

With Richard Wright as her associate editor, Dorothy West created the Harlem Renaissance literary magazines Challenge and New Challenge in 1934 and 1937, respectively. During the Great Depression, she worked as a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem. Her debut book, The Living Is Easy, was published in 1948 and is still in print today. When her second novel, The Wedding, was released in the winter of 1995, it became a national bestseller and literary landmark. The Richer, The Poorer, a collection of her stories and personal essays, was published in the summer of 1995. At the age of 91, she died in August 1998.