for the New York Timesas its Paris correspondent.
In 1925, with generous amounts of information
and text that he solicited from Langston Hughes,
he published a series of articles in VANITYFAIR
about a variety of African-American entertain-
ment figures and subjects.
Van Vechten’s first marriage, to a Cedar
Rapids high school friend named Ann Snyder, took
place in London in 1907. After five years, the mar-
riage ended badly, and Van Vechten had to con-
tend with his ex-wife’s demands for money.
Ultimately, the couple settled on a $1,000 pay-
ment, for which Van Vechten went into debt. Ann
Snyder’s life ended tragically after years of self-
imposed exile in Europe. In 1933, sick with cancer,
she committed suicide by leaping to her death
from a Paris sanatorium (Kellner, 91). In 1914 Van
Vechten married Fania Marinoff, an actress from
Odessa who had immigrated to the United States
in the 1890s. According to Van Vechten biogra-
pher Bruce Kellner, Fania, whose mother died
when Fania was an infant, was secreted under her
stepmother’s skirts during much of the journey so
that the family could avoid paying additional fares.
The Marinoffs settled in Boston, Massachusetts,
and Fania, who in school was known as Fanny Ep-
stein, eventually followed her brother to Denver,
Colorado. Her career on the stage began in Col-
orado, and by the age of 12 she had joined a travel-
ing theater troupe. She eventually arrived in New
York City, and it was there that Van Vechten met
the woman whom the newspapers described as “a
darksome and delightful slip of a girl” (Kellner, 63).
Although the couple was extremely close and ap-
peared together quite frequently at the numerous
celebratory events in Harlem, scholars like Arnold
Rampersad note that FANIA MARINOFF VAN
VECHTEN “didn’t care much for Van Vechten’s
hard drinking and Harlem club-crawling” (Ram-
persad, 108).
Van Vechten stopped writing criticism in 1920,
when he was 40 years old, noting that at that age,
“a man experienced intellectual hardening of the
arteries which made him unfit for criticism” (NYT,
22 December 1964). While he did publish an occa-
sional review after his dramatic pronouncement, he
turned his attention away from the writing that
many viewed as an indispensable facet of the arts
scene. The work that he had produced to date gen-
erated high praise. His assessments of dance, even
when read years later, were deemed by many to be
“as sound as they ever were and the prescience they
exhibit in an art in which America (in common
with most of the rest of the world) was abysmally il-
literate bespeaks a remarkably sensitive and for-
ward-looking mind. That they played a major part
in the creation of public taste cannot be gainsaid”
(NYT,18 June 1961, X15). Van Vechten’s “passion-
ate collecting of items pertaining to the Negro con-
tribution to American life” included “photos,
manuscripts, 400 early phonograph records by
Negro musicians, letters and the like” (NYT,22 De-
cember 1964, 29).
Throughout the 1920s Van Vechten turned his
creative energies toward writing fiction. Journalist
Leo Lerman described the works, which varied inVan Vechten, Carl 541Carl Van Vechten, author, photographer, and patron.
Photographed by Mark Lutz. Permission granted by the
Van Vechten Trust (Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)