Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Critical Assessment

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Critical Assessment
ISBN-10
0815331266
ISBN-13
9780815331261
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
185
Language
English
Published
1998
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Author
Leon Coleman

Description

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)

Other editions

Similar books