SOURCE: “Beyond the Color Line,” in The New Yorker, Vol. 74, No. 26, September 27, 1998, p. 82.

In the following obituary, Gates, a noted African-American intellectual, pays tribute to West's portrayal of the diversity of black life in America.

One recent Saturday morning, several hundred people gathered at that sacred meeting ground the Union Chapel, in Oak Bluffs, to bid farewell to one of the oldest and most celebrated citizens of Martha's Vineyard. Dorothy West, ninety-one when she died, was a novelist, short-story writer, and longtime columnist for the Vineyard Gazette, and the last surviving member of the nineteen-twenties literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. In those days, her writer friends called her “the kid from Boston.” The kid from Boston got around: she once roomed with Zora Neale Hurston, was proposed to by Countee Cullen (she declined), and travelled to Soviet Russia with Langston Hughes. She had seen the revolution...