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West had been writing for more than twenty years when her first novel was published. Without the publication of The Living Is Easy, the novel that solidified her place as an influential and important American writer, I would not be writing this biography. While conducting dissertation research for what would ultimately become my first book, Portraits of the New Negro Woman, I came across a box in the James Weldon Johnson/Carl Van Vechten collection of Yale University’s Beinecke Library. As is so often the case with the papers of women writers, this collection was confusingly filed under “Mildred Wirt,” a pseudonym that has been attributed to West but one that she denies.1 I discovered the final, handwritten draft of The Living Is Easy. I could barely contain my excitement. I held in my hands an original draft penned by the author of a novel I had recently read and loved. That tactile experience spurred my interest in West, and I eventually published an article on the novel.2 At the top of her handwritten manuscript West wrote: “If this ain’t it, it’ll have to do. This is my last go around. I need not add that I’m sure you’re damned of it if it isn’t yours.”3 Presumably these words are addressed to West’s agent George Bye. Originally, West had hoped that Ladies’ Home Journal would serialize her novel. This aspiration was in line with her desire for a larger interracial audience and the commercial success of more popular fiction writers. Other African American women novelists had similar hopes for their fiction. Jessie Fauset’s 1931 novel The Chinaberry Tree, published by Frederick A. Stokes, included a foreword by Zona Gale, a middlebrow modern who courted mainstream success and modernist aesthetics. Susan Tomlinson observed that Gale’s foreword “foregrounds the exceptionality of the novel’s depicted community and barely alludes to the novel’s themes, so that the text is made to resemble a sociological study rather than a work of fiction.”4 Tomlinson notes that Gale’s introduction downplays the literary aspects of The Chinaberry 123 The Living Is Easy I don’t know which is more interesting, whether fiction or life . . . —Dorothy West (Linsey Lee, “Interview with Dorothy West”) 6 DOROTHY WEST’S PARADISE 124 Tree by arguing for Fauset’s qualifications to write an account of the black bourgeoisie; moreover, such assertions are in line with the promotion of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), which was serialized in Scribner’s magazine before being published in its entirety. Also, Nella Larsen, anticipating that her novels might be read outside the sphere of the Harlem Renaissance, purportedly undertook the writing of a “white novel” during her Guggenheim fellowship; no such manuscript is extant to corroborate this assertion. The editors of Ladies’ Home Journal, presumably concerned that advertisers would withdraw their financial support if they serialized a novel about black middle-class life, declined to publish the novel. West told interviewer Deborah McDowell: “The magazine was very enthusiastic about serializing the novel, but when their board of editors met—Blackwell’s; they were power people—they decided against it. I have always felt that they feared the loss of advertising revenues by serializing a novel by a Black woman about Black people.”5 If The Living Is Easy had been serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal, then the novel might have enjoyed a longer life in print. West was perfectly suited to be a “cross-over” writer, to use a contemporary term, because she had already published several short stories in the Daily News in which the racial identity of the characters was either ambiguous or silent. In fact, a columnist announcing the book release party for The Living Is Easy, which was hosted by Marian Minus and Harold Jackman at Frances Reckling’s 125th Street Studio, writes: “You’ve been enjoying [West’s] short stories for years in New York’s largest daily, but probably didn’t realize she was a Negro.”6 Houghton Mifflin published her manuscript as a novel in 1948, and The Living Is Easy was reviewed widely in both national and local papers from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Defender and the Atlanta Daily World. The interracial reception of the novel suggests that the fears of Ladies’ Home Journal, who believed that the novel would be poorly received and offend advertisers, were unfounded...

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