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Popular western writer Zane Grey was a literary celebrity during his lifetime and the center of a huge enterprise based on his writing, which included books, magazine serials, film and stage versions of his stories, even comic strips. His wife, Dolly, closely guided Grey's career almost from its beginning, editing and sometimes revising his work, negotiating with publishers and movie studios, and skillfully managing the considerable fortune derived from these activities.

Dolly maintained the facade of a conventional married life that was essential to Grey's public image and the traditional middle-class values his work reflected. This facade was constantly threatened by Grey's numerous affairs with other women. The stress of hiding these dalliances placed a huge strain on their relationship, and much of Zane and Dolly's union was sustained largely by correspondence. Their letters--thousands of them--reveal the true nature of this complex partnership. As edited by Candace Kant, the letters offer an engrossing portrait of an extremely unorthodox marriage and its times.

The friendship between Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane began in 1920 in the publicity office of the American Red Cross in Paris and continued until Thompson’s death in 1961. Although both women are today remembered primarily for their connections with others —Thompson as the wife of Sinclair Lewis, and Lane as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House” books —each was remarkable in her own right.

Both women had a vital engagement with life that led them in fearless pursuit of   experience.  In 1939, Thompson appeared on the cover of Time, which judged her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt among influential women of the day. Typical of Lane were her travels through the mountains of Albania, the deserts of Syria, and Soviet Georgia in the 1920s and her visit as a journalist to Vietnam in 1965 at the age of seventy-eight.

The correspondence of these two talented and articulate women reveals their personal concerns, social ideas, and political/economic philosophies and how they changed over time. Their letters tell the story of the first generation of women to come of age during the twentieth century, as they tried to cope with problems that women still face today. Along with the letters themselves, Holtz has included annotations and footnotes that provide biographical information, as well as explaining personal and topical references.
 

Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community. In the years between publishing her two novels, 1948’s The Living is Easy and the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette.

Dorothy West’s Paradise captures the scope of the author’s long life and career, reading it alongside the unique cultural geography of Oak Bluffs and its history as an elite African American enclave—a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. An essential book for both fans of West’s fiction and students of race, class, and American women’s lives, Dorothy West’s Paradise offers an intimate biography of an important author and a privileged glimpse into the society that shaped her work.