The Wedding

Dorothy West

Jun 1998 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Regina Taylor

About this audiobook

From Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, The Wedding is an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, this is the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.
With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

About the author

Dorothy West was born in Boston in 1907 and moved to New York in the 1920s to take part in the flowering of African American arts and letters that would come to be called the Harlem Renaissance. Friend and colleague to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, West founded the influential magazine Challenge in 1934, and in 1937 she started New Challenge, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, appeared in 1948, and her short stories are widely anthologized. A collection of short stories and autobiographical pieces, The Richer, The Poorer, was published by Doubleday last summer. She has lived year-round on Martha's Vineyard since 1943.