as a welfare investigator and then participated in
the Federal Writers’ Project (WPA) until it ended
in the mid-1940s. From the 1940s to the 1960s,
she wrote more than 26 short stories for the New
York Daily News. After World War II, West left New
York permanently to live on Martha’s Vineyard,
where she contributed intermittently to the Vine-
yard Gazette from the 1960s until the early 1990s,
including her weekly column on the year-round
social activities of the residents of Oak Bluffs on
the island.
As a novelist, West’s work was sparse. Her first
and only known novel for several decades was
The LIVING IS EASY (1948), which satirizes affluent
black Bostonians for allowing class differences to
create gaps between them and the working-class
community. Published in 1995, The Wedding, her
second novel, was developed and adapted for tele-
vision by Oprah Winfrey. Enthusiastically received
by critics and the public, The Wedding chronicles
the life of the main character, a 90-year-old near-
white woman, who, forced by her economic condi-
tion, moved in with her fair-skinned daughter and
her hated dark-skinned son-in-law. Also in 1995,
West published her collection of short stories and
essays The Richer, The Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and
Reminiscences, some of which were published in
periodicals from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Though Dorothy West’s literary career spanned
more than 70 years, she has not received the criti-
cal attention her contributions to black American
literature deserve. However, since her publications
in the 1990s, critics have reexamined her works in
the context of her contemporaries and have found
that West’s writings exemplify the wealth of artis-
tic talent prevalent during and after the HARLEM
RENAISSANCE. Among the first to explore the ironic
possibilities of the black urban lifestyle for litera-
ture, West, who demonstrated great energy and
creativity until the end of her productive career,
has become a highly regarded writer. West died on
August 16, 1998, in Boston.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Dorothy A. “Rediscovering Dorothy West.”
American Visions 8 (1993): 46–47.
Ferguson, Sally A. “Dorothy West.” Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography. Vol. 76: Afro-American Writers,
1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris, 187–195.
Detroit: Gale, 1988.
McDowell, Deborah E. “Conversation with Dorothy
West.” In The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined,
edited by Victor A. Kramer, 265–282. New York:
AMS Press, 1987.
Steinberg, Sybil. “Dorothy West: Her Own Renais-
sance.” Publishers Weekly 242 (July 3, 1995): 34–
35.
Loretta G. WoodardWhat You Owe Me
Bebe Moore Campbell (2001)
What You Owe Me is a novel of epic proportions.
It addresses a host of 20th-century race and class
dilemmas, particularly the similar histories yet
strained relations and unequal opportunities of
African Americans and Jews, the achievement of
reparations for Jews and the stalled debate over
reparations for African Americans, the complica-
tions of interracial friendships, the obligations of
economically successful upper-class Americans to-
ward poor and working-class Americans, and the
enduring racial discrimination deeply entrenched
in America’s free-enterprise system. The novel’s
overarching theme, to which all these subplots
adhere, illustrates that restoration from theft and
betrayal requires contrition and restitution. To nar-
rativize this grand theme, BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL
creates a multigenerational landscape and a multi-
plicity of characters and subplots, all drawn lucidly
but connected with varying degrees of success.
Campbell’s modern epic is most successful in
creating and connecting the protagonists—Ho-
sanna Clark, an African-American migrant to
post–World War II Los Angeles from a racially
hostile town in Inez, Texas, and Gilda Rosenstein,
a Holocaust survivor and immigrant to Los Ange-
les from Poland. However, these characters must
move to the margins of the narrative to demon-
strate the intergenerational legacy that Gilda and
Hosanna’s friendship sets in motion and to dem-542 What You Owe Me