Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades

Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades

Kellner, Bruce
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968
First edition, with dust jacket

In a brilliant evocation of a whole age, from la belle epoch through the legendary Twenties, Bruce Kellner has traced the fascinating life of Carl Van Vechten, one of America's most distinguished men of letters.

Carl Van Vechten's story sparkles with the names of the century's most celebrated creative artists: Mary Garden, Theodore Dreiser, Isadora Duncan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Hugh Walpole, George Jean Nathan, Bessie Smith, Talullah Bankhead, Fania Marinoff (who he married), H. L. Mencken, George Gershwin, James Weldon Johnson, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, and many others, famous and infamous.

As friend and mentor, Van Vechten strolled among them through the liveliest periods in recent history. This biography documents that scintillating stroll, the landmarks it passed and those it established.—dust jacket