The Typewriter Dorothy - West

The "click-clack" of the keys provides a heartbeat to his fantasy, though the ink on the paper is the only place his success truly exists.

For Dorothy West, the typewriter was never just a machine. It was a weapon against invisibility. Born in 1907 in Boston, she had been the youngest and one of the few women in the Harlem literati. While Zora Neale Hurston collected folklore and Langston Hughes wrote blues poetry, West wrote sharp, satirical stories about the Black upper class—a world of “tea cakes and petty snobberies.” Her tool was an old Underwood or Royal (she favored portables she could move toward the light). Its keys were heavy, requiring decisive strikes. You couldn’t hesitate with a manual typewriter. Every letter was a commitment. the typewriter dorothy west

During the decades between her first novel and her second, The Wedding , published nearly forty years later, the typewriter was her constant companion. It was here that she edited the Challenge and later New Challenge magazines, attempting to keep the literary spirit of the Renaissance alive during the Great Depression. It was here that she wrote her column for the Vineyard Gazette . In the solitude of the island, the sound of the typewriter keys was a declaration of relevance. It was a refusal to be silenced by the passage of time. The machine was her connection to the intellectual community that had dispersed, a solitary drummer keeping the beat for a parade that had long since moved on. The "click-clack" of the keys provides a heartbeat