The Wedding - Dorothy West

In her first novel in 47 years, West offers a window into the rise of the black middle class as she lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, this work weaves the North and South, black and white, past and present into an engrossing tale of race and class set in Martha's Vineyard. In her final novel, Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of blue-vein society, we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions. Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community. With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.