The Living Is Easy by Dorothy West. Old Westbury. 1982. The Feminist Press. 0912670975. Afterword by Adelaide M. Cromwell. 368 pages. paperback. Cover: Richmond Barthe-'Portrait of a Woman'.  

DESCRIPTION - One of only a handful of novels published by black women during the 1940s, THE LIVING IS EASY is the story of Cleo Judson, a share-cropper's daughter who ‘never had to be taught how to hold her head high, how to scorn sin with men, and how to keep her right hand from knowing what her left hand was doing.' Strong-willed, with a viper's tongue and upper-class aspirations, Cleo leaves the South to seek her fortune in Boston. There she meets Bart Judson, ‘the black banana king,' whose wealth and prestige allow Cleo to become a member of Boston's early-twentieth-century black elite, into which one gains entry through money, light-skinned beauty, or both. A long-time cult classic, THE LIVING IS EASY is a delightfully wry and ironic novel coexisting within a framework of challenging moral and social complexity.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - DOROTHY WEST (June 2, 1907, Boston, MA - August 16, 1998, Boston, MA) 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 l948 and is still in print, and her short stories appear in numerous anthologies. Her 1995 novel THE WEDDING was a national bestseller. She lives on Martha's Vineyard.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author