The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard: Stories, Essays and Reminiscences by Dorothy West Writing in the Vineyard Gazette

Rating:
Summary: A Poor Excuse for a Book
Review: Ever since her rediscovery, Dorothy West, who recently passed away, has been rightly hailed as the last living writer of the Harlem Renaissance, an important author who focused on middle-class African American lives in the mid-twentieth century, and an artist of the first rank whose career was tragically put on hold for a number of reasons having to do with canonization, race, and sexism. This allegedly scholarly collection purports to bring us her writings during her nearly 40-year absence from the public stage, when she lived on Martha's Vineyard and wrote for the local paper. But the collection is hastily assembled according to no discernible guiding principles (other than, of course, to take advantage of the West revival and to make a buck). There is a perfunctory introduction that lacks insight and introduces nothing, and that also has no attributions to the serious scholarship on West that it borrows from but does not bother to acknowledge. There is no scholarly apparatus, nor annotations nor footnotes, nothing that is remotely helpful for either the student of West or for the interested non-scholar. The book seems to have been produced in as much time as it took these editors to grab a bunch of West's many columns, type them into a word processor, and send them off to a third-rate press that will publish anything. ... West is a terrific writer; she deserved a lot better than to have her unpublished material looted for profit.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I love reading history and am a loyal fan of black women authors, but this book is way too expensive! Would rather check it out from the library than own it.