Dorothy West (c.1909–1998), novelist, short story writer, editor, and journalist, was born and educated in Boston. West wrote her first story at the age of seven; by the time she was fourteen, she had won several writing competitions sponsored by the Boston Post. At eighteen, wider recognition followed when her story "The Typewriter" won a prize from Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League. After attending Boston University and the Columbia School of Journalism, West settled in Harlem, where she founded the magazine Challenge (and later, New Challenge). By publishing the work of her friends and colleagues—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay—she brought into focus the great talent of the Harlem Renaissance. When the periodical failed, West participated in the Federal Writers' Project until the mid-1940s.

In her writings, West explores the important issues of race and class within the African-American community. She probes deeply into the minds of her characters, who face moral, psychological, and social confinement. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, published in 1948, is a semi-autobiographical account depicting middle-class' blacks' pursuit of false values that result in economic and psychological imprisonment. Her second novel, The Wedding, published in 1995, became a two-part television miniseries produced by Oprah Winfrey.