with Press release and publisher letter

West, Dorothy

The Living is Easy [With EXTRAS]

Lawrence Beall Smith. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company 1948. First Edition. [4], [1]-347, [1] pages. 8vo. Publishers beige cloth binding with brown lettering. Dust jacket printed in green/brown, white, and yellow. Spine slanted with a 1 inch x 3/4 inch chip to the cloth at the base of the spine. Bright and clean internally. The scarce dust jacket is worn, price clippped, frayed at the extremities, a few internal stains and with a large chip at the base of the spine panel.

Included with the book is a one page letter from [Richard] Diggory Venn at Houghton Mifflin to Miss Marjorie Mills at the Boston Herald (a Boston newspaper) supplying a copy of the Living is Easy book: "Miss West is a Negress born and brought up in Boston and her book is about Boston's Negro society at the turn of the century. We have high hopes of it and it has been very well received so far." He continues by inviting her to Dorothy Hillyer's house (an editor for Houghton Mifflin) for a small party for West. He also supplies a 2 page Houghton Mifflin press release (mimeo'd) for release on or after May 13, 1948 which includes quotes from Dorothy West, her background, and how the novel came to be.

In all, three items, a nice package. Very Good / Fair. Cloth. [29677]


A decent copy of the author's first book in the scarce dust jacket and with some nice ephemera.

"Dorothy West (June 2, 1907 – August 16, 1998) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and magazine editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated black art, literature, and music. She was one of the few Black women writers to be published in major literary magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. West is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family and their attempts to climb the social ladder. She also explored the complexities of the black experience in the United States in short stories and essays that challenged stereotypes and explored themes such as race, class, and gender. Her work paved the way for future generations of African-American writers, and her legacy continues to inspire and influence writers today." (Wikipedia)

"In the first decades of the century Negro society in Boston was dominated by a half-dozen families as self-consciously aristocratic as the Cabots, the Lodges, and the Lowells. Beautiful Cleo Judson, recently arrive from a South Carolina share cropper's cabin, did not belong to this exclusive cell. But partly because she saw high fashion as a realistic toe hold on Opportunity, she was determind to get in and to carry her reluctant family with her. Thus she became the evil genie in a widening circle of lives: for her sisters, and her daughter, Judy: for her husband, Bart Judson, the Black Banana King, who had chased the Almighty Dollar all his life, and who was determind to 'put salt on its tail' before he died: for the glamourous 'Duchess,' who wanted only to be accepted as a member of her race: for Simeon, the Harvard idealiist who dreamed of editing a militant newspaper in Boston. In its anatomy of the manners of othese first-, second-, and third-generation dark Bostonians, The Living Is Easy is socialogical in the best sense of the word. At the same time it is a swift-paced drama in which the strange is both real and moving." (from the dj)

Price: $1,500.00