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.

This book evaluates Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting hitherto unexamined documentary evidence. The author draws on correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, and published materials to examine the origins and development of the period in the 1920s which was termed the New Negro Renaissance. In the later years of the 1920s, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. The vehement controversy which the book aroused among African American critics and the black press, who attacked it, and the African American authors and friends of Van Vechten who defended it, obscured the true extent of Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance. This study sheds light on the Van Vechten controversy which has continued to the present day. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969; revised with new preface)

Story of the education of a youth whose father is determined that his son shall not suffer any of his own disadvantages.

DIVA collection of writings and artwork by Richard Bruce Nugent, an important yet heretofore obscure figure of the Harlem Renaissance./div

Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a key advocate for modernism across the arts in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a critic of music, dance, and literature, as novelist, as photographer, as patron of the arts, and as saloniste, he exerted an influence on the development and reception of popular and avant-garde forms of modernism – from jazz, blues, and early cinema to Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky. Though currently less well-known than ‘Lost Generation’ contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Van Vechten was a popular and critically acclaimed figure in his day. Van Vechten’s novels are worthy of recuperation for their distinctive take on the raucous spirit of the Jazz Age, bringing a witty and sardonic viewpoint to issues that his modernist contemporaries approached with gravity. This edition brings back into print Van Vechten’s second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), which his most recent biographer has called a ‘great, forgotten American novel of the 1920s’. It is thoroughly annotated and provides an introduction that foregrounds the novel’s importance for literary modernism and as a treatment of queer identity.