West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948. The heroine of the novel lives initially in the South End, and in it West writes of Boston African-American residents, “Those among them who were born in Boston fell into the customs of their southern-bred kin before they were old enough to know that a Bostonian, black or white, should consider himself a special species of fish.” She also writes of a five-year-old boy, “He had never heard any discussions about the difference in man. All that he knew was that there was a favored race of people called Bostonians, and that he was fortunate enough to be one of them.”