Carl Van Vechten: 11 books

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...

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,...

Before Carl Van Vechten's later careers--as the first dance critic in America, as a best-selling novelist during the Jazz Age of the Twenties, as the leading white champion of African American arts and letters, and as a celebrity photographer--he was Assistant Music Critic for the New York Times (1906-13)....

The splendid drunken twenties in New York: First published in 1925, the novel centers around a wide cast of characters whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mysterious Gunnar O'Grady in 1920s New York. Though, like most Van Vechten novels, there is more than actually meets the eye. The book...

This is Carl Van Vechten's 1921 collection of short stories, “Lords of the Housetops”. Every story is linked by a common theme of cats, each telling a fantastic tale of feline adventure and daring-do. This volume is ideal for children with a love of cats, and it would make for a charming addition...

As Carl Van Vechten notes in his preface to this collection, “In the essay and especially in poetry the cat has become a favourite subject, but in fiction it must be admitted that he lags considerably behind the dog.” Van Vechten sought to mitigate this disparity by creating this collection of...

Carl Van Vechten was not only America’s first dance critic, but the first to champion American music and consider ragtime and jazz serious genres. This 1916 collection of writings heralded the Jazz Age with such irreverent but informed assessments as “Music for the Movies,” “Spain and Music,” “Shall We Realize Wagner’s Ideals?” and “The Bridge Burners.”

“Un dio, un compagno delle streghe durante i sabba, un animale considerato nobile in Thailandia, ‘la tigre che mangia dalla mano’ in Giappone, l’animale preferito di Maometto, il rivale di Laura nell’amore del Petrarca, l’amico di Richelieu, il favorito dei poeti…” sono soltanto alcune...

This 1922 novel is an early example of a modern metafiction.  Based on Van Vechten's own experiences in Paris, and featuring himself as first-person narrator, as well as many of his friends and acquaintances as characters, the novel revolves around an entirely fictional personage, the eponymous Peter Whiffle, a would-be writer.

Think you know cats? Here is the domesticated feline in history, folklore, art, theater, fiction, poetry, music, the law, and even the occult. The author includes a list of more than 300 references to cats in literature, from the British Medical Journal and Darwin to Baudelaire and Mark Twain. A classic in the genre.

In the essay and especially in poetry the cat has become a favourite subject, but in fiction it must be admitted that he lags considerably behind the dog. The reasons for this apparently arbitrary preference on the part of authors are perfectly easy to explain. The instinctive acts of the dog, who is...