On the island of Martha's Vineyard, a very special community has flourished since the turn of the century, an exclusive summer colony of affluent vacationers. A proud, insular, nearly unassailable group, it is made up of the best and the brightest of America's black middle class. A world of doctors and ministers and lawyers and college presidents, it represents a side of the black experience known by too few, a side that is seldom considered.

Langston Hughes once called Dorothy West "a student of the human race," and The Wedding bears him out, for it contains some of the most unforgettable flesh-and-blood characters you will ever meet, including Shelby Coles, the daughter of a loveless marriage, whose engagement to a white jazz musician threatens to tear her family apart; Lute McNeil, a social-climbing Boston businessman who sees in Shelby and her family everything he could ever want for his three motherless daughters, and who sells his soul to try to win her; and Gram, the daughter of a plantation owner, whose own daughter broke her heart long ago by marrying an ex-slave, and who is kept alive only by bitterness.

It is a world Dorothy West knows well, for it is her world, and in The Wedding she brings it to wonderful life.