The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences

by Dorothy West

Overview

On the heels of the bestseller success of her  novel The Wedding, Dorothy West,  the last surviving member of the Harlem  Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that  explore both the realism of everyday life, and the  fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of one  woman's life in a mythic time. Traversing the  universal themes and conflicts between poverty and  prosperity, men and women, and young and old, and  compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,  The Richer, The Poorer not only  affords an unparalleled window into the  African-American middle class, but also delves into the  richness of experience of "one of the finest writers  produced in this country during the Roaring  Twenties"(Book Page).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385471466
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/20/1996
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	849,441
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.43(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"West writes like a social historian,  capturing significant moments that seem to alter  lives forever or change nothing at  all."—Los Angeles  Times

"Unforced perfection . . . beautifully cadenced.  West has shown the power of what is left  unspoken."—Chicago  Tribune

"Dorothy West is an epic  storyteller."—Quarterly Black Review of Books

From the Publisher

Drawing on a career spanning almost 70 years, this selection of fiction and essays provides an overview of the work of one of the enduring figures of the Harlem Renaissance. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

True, West just made waves with her second novel, The Wedding (LJ 12/94)-published 46 years after she debuted with The Living Is Easy-but she is best known for her short stories. This last living member of the Harlem Renaissance here collects all her classic short works and augments them with some autobiographical sketches.

Library Journal