Emily Bernard starts her biography, “This book is a portrait of a once controversial figure, Carl Van Vechten, a white man with a passion for blackness.” And while today more people can recognize Carl Van Vechten as a patron and leader of the black arts and Harlem Renaissance movement, in
Read an excerpt from Elizabeth and Hazel There are no simple stories, if they’re true. Fifty five years ago, a young black student named Elizabeth Eckford moved toward Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas to attend class for the first time. She was part of what would be known as
Read an excerpt from Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten, the controversial patron of the Harlem Renaissance, was indeed a Renaissance man: art critic, novelist, adviser, social host and man-about-town. Yet in his role as a letter writer we see him as a passionate epistolary friend.
Looking ahead to September’s Political Economy theme on the Yale Press Log, this month we celebrate the one-year publication anniversary of two powerful books from Yale University Press: Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen and Donna Hicks’s Dignity. On the surface, these authors have established themselves in very different niches of the
Where do we draw the line between our own personal history – history with a small “h” – and the History we consider public knowledge – history with a big “H”? This is an important question for historical researchers of any caliber. It shapes the way we value (and the
A sensitive discussion will ensue for anyone who names Carl Van Vechten a “father” of the Harlem Renaissance. Although married to Russian actress Fania Marinoff, Van Vechten never had children. Nevertheless, he was a patron and active supporter of many young artists and writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
In her second piece for “Eminent Biography” Emily Bernard, author of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, explores the relationships of Carl Van Vechten and the many women who circled through his interracial and inter-artistic world of the Harlem Renaissance. After all, it is
Sarah Underwood— Think back to yourself at age fifteen. That’s the age both the women profiled in David Margolick’s Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock were when Will Counts took his famous photograph. Many people assumed Hazel Bryan, the screaming, hateful white girl in the picture, had to
The friendships that formed the conversations of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex ideas of the relationships between art and race were the vein of black literary life of the early twentieth century. As editor of the volume of letters, Remember Me to Harlem: The Correspondence of Langston Hughes and
When Carla L. Peterson proposed a trip to the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the hope of finding a record of her ancestors, her historian friends were skeptical. In fact, it was only by a lucky chance that Peterson discovered a scrapbook page onto