Dorothy West (1907 – 1998) was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. The Richer, The Poorer,  published in 1995, is collection of her short stories and essays spanning nearly seventy years of West’s writing.

Though she didn’t produce a large body of work, West’s writing is admired for its nuanced views of middle and upper middle-class African-American communities and its examinations of gender, class, and social structure.

Her first novel, The Living is Easy (1948), depicts the life of an upper-class black family. It remained her only novel for decades, until The Wedding was published in 1995, the same year that The Richer, The Poorer was published. 

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