The Wedding

West published her second novel, The Wedding (1995), at the age of 87. It received an ecstatic reaction … Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family … timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender * Paris Review *
The tranquility of a late summer weekend in 1953 is shattered by a tragic accident in this spare, affecting novel by one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance … Through the ancestral histories of the Coles family, West subtly reveals the ways in which color can burden and codify behavior. The author makes her points with a delicate hand, maneuvering with confidence and ease through a sometimes incendiary subject … a triumph. * Publisher’s Weekly *
West is a wonderful storyteller, painting vivid and memorable scenes of the life and plight of African Americans from slavery to the fifties. The Wedding is an engrossing tale * USA Today *
In The Wedding, West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations * Entertainment Weekly *
You have only to read the first page to know that you are in the hands of a writer, pure and simple. At the end, it’s as though we’ve been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera, only to find that one great artist is belting out all the parts. She brings down the house * New York Times *
A writer of huge compassion and acute observation, and also of dazzling style … Her work is more relevant than ever
This story of delicately drawn, but crushing conflicts - between black and white, the North and the South, freedom and duty - build to a shattering climax. Once read, it’s impossible to forget. * The Times *

Dorothy West was a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1930s. She founded literary magazines Challenge and New Challenge, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, was published in 1948. Her second novel, The Wedding, was published nearly half a century later, in 1995, and was a bestseller. This was followed by The Richer, The Poorer, a rich collection of stories and essays that spanned her long life. She died in 1998, at the age of ninety-one.

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