The Wedding - Paperback

by Dorothy West (Author)

In her final novel, "a beautiful and devastating examination of family, society and race" (The New York Times), Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's Black bourgeoisie on Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s.

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.

Front Jacket

The publication of "The Wedding by Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, was not only a landmark literary event, but a commercial success as well. Readers across America responded to West's delicat weaving of North and South, black and white, past and present in this "fascinating and engrossing tale" ("People) of race and class set in Martha's Vineyard.In her first novel in forty-seven years, West offers a window into the rise of the black middle class as she lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, "The Wedding is Dorothy West's crowning achievement, and one of the last books edited for Doubleday by the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Author Biography

Dorothy West founded the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Challenge in 1934, and New Challenge in 1937, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, appeared in 1948 and remains in print. Her second novel, The Wedding, was a national bestseller and literary landmark when published in the winter of 1995. A collection of her stories and autobiographical essays, The Richer, The Poorer, appeared during the summer of 1995. She died in August 1998, at the age of 91.