Books by Carl Van Vechten
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
by Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten
Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless.
Despite their differences — Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met–Hughes’ and Van Vechten’s shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone — from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. It’s a correspondence that, as Emily Bernard notes in her introduction, provides “an unusual record of entertainment, politics, and culture as seen through the eyes of two fascinating and irreverent men.
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The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat (New York Review Books Classics)
“A god, a companion to sorceresses at the Witches’ Sabbath, a beast who is royal in Siam, who in Japan is called ‘the tiger that eats from the hand,’ the adored of Mohammed, Laura’s rival with Petrarch, the friend of Richelieu, the favorite of poets”—such are just a few of the feline distinctions that Carl Van Vechten records in this glorious historical overview of humanity’s long love affair with the cat. As delightful as it is learned, Tiger in the House explores science, art, and history to assemble a treasury of cat lore, while Van Vechten’s sumptuous baroque prose
makes the book’s every page an inexhaustible pleasure.
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Nigger Heaven (African American Studies)
"Here upper-class elites discuss art in well-appointed drawing rooms; rowdy and lascivious drunks spend long nights in jazz clubs and speakeasies; and politically conscious young intellectuals drink coffee and debate "the race problem" in walkup apartments. At the center of the story, two young people - a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer - struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
by Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten
This monumental collection of correspondence between Gertrude Stein and critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten provides crucial insight into Stein's life, art, and artistic milieu as well as Van Vechten's support of major cultural projects, such as the Harlem Renaissance. From their first meeting in 1913, Stein and Van Vechten formed a unique and powerful relationship, and Van Vechten worked vigorously to publish and promote Stein's work. Existing biographies of Stein--including her own autobiographical writings--omit a great deal about her experiences and thought. They lack the ordinary detail of what Stein called "daily everyday living": the immediate concerns, objects, people, and places that were the grist for her writing. These letters not only vividly represent those details but also showcase Stein and Van Vechten's private selves as writers. Edward Burns's extensive annotations include detailed cross-referencing of source materials.
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