Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), American writer, photographer, and cultural critic, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a prosperous banking family. Educated at the University of Chicago, he began his career as a journalist, serving as an assistant music critic at the New York Times under his mentor and later close friend Mary Garden's circle, and as the paper's first regular dance critic. He wrote incisively on opera, ballet, and popular music, later publishing collections of criticism including Music After the Great War (1915) and The Music of Spain (1918). In the 1920s he turned to fiction, producing a series of satirical, epigrammatic novels chronicling Jazz Age society: Peter Whiffle (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Firecrackers (1925), and Spider Boy (1928). His best-known and most controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), set in Harlem, provoked fierce debate for its title and subject matter but was defended by figures such as James Weldon Johnson for its sympathetic engagement with Black Harlem life; others, including W. E. B. Du Bois, condemned it as exploitative. Van Vechten was a central white patron and promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, cultivating friendships and professional relationships with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters, among others. He used his social connections to open doors for Black writers and performers with white publishers and audiences, a role historians have assessed ambivalently — as both generous advocacy and a form of exoticizing patronage. After 1932 he largely abandoned fiction and devoted himself to photography, producing an extensive body of portraits of literary, artistic, and theatrical figures of the twentieth century, now held primarily at Yale's Beinecke Library, which he helped establish as a repository (including the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, which he founded). He married actress Fania Marinoff in 1914; the marriage lasted until his death, despite his open homosexuality, which he negotiated within their relationship. He died in New York City in 1964.
8 works on Textopian