Anna May Wong, and my second was Eugene
O’Neill” (NYT,22 December 1964, 29). Other
subjects included Tallulah Bankhead, Marc Cha-
gall, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Joe Louis,
RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT, Bessie Smith, and
Thomas Wolfe. Van Vechten’s love of photography
often propelled him into the darkroom in the early
morning hours, and he was working on images up
until the morning before he passed away.
Van Vechten was a close friend of Langston
Hughes, with whom he corresponded frequently
for decades. During the course of their friendship,
which began in the mid-1920s and lasted through
1964, the two men exchanged nearly 1,500 letters
(Bernard, xxix). Hughes introduced Van Vechten
to Richard Bruce Nugent, who reflected that the
contact was arranged because Hughes knew that
Van Vechten “could be helpful to me. I knew that
when he introduced me. I knew it wasn’t just that
[Hughes] was interested and intrigued and amused
that I thought Carl was a white monkey” (Wirth,
226). Hughes worked closely with Van Vechten,
the patron who succeeded in obtaining a publish-
ing contract for Hughes’s first volume of poems in
less than three weeks. Another of Van Vechten’s
close friends was writer Gertrude Stein. Their rela-
tionship evolved, from the early days when Van
Vechten would publish reviews of her work, to
Stein’s appointment of him as literary executor of
her estate.
Van Vechten was a steady supporter of
African-American ventures during the Harlem Re-
naissance. In addition to donating funds to support
OPPORTUNITY,he facilitated numerous introduc-
tions, negotiated publishing contracts for writers,
and participated in formal debates about the na-
ture of African-American art and creativity. In
1926 he collaborated with JESSIEFAUSETto gener-
ate a questionnaire about the “The Negro in Art.”
Van Vechten also took advantage of his intense fa-
miliarity with Harlem nightspots and social circles
to become what David Levering Lewis has de-
scribed as “white America’s guide through
Harlem.” FISKUNIVERSITYhonored Van Vechten
with an honorary degree in 1955. He received the
Yale University Gold Medal that same year.
On December 21, 1964, Van Vechten died in
his Central Park West apartment. The New York
City icon, whose 75th birthday party had been held
in the 135th Street branch (HARLEMBRANCH) of
the NEWYORKPUBLICLIBRARY, was remembered
as an “enthusiastic discoverer of young or over-
looked talent and lover of cats.” He was celebrated
for using fiction to create a “documentary study of
the nineteen-twenties” and a series of “thinly veiled
portraits of the era’s leading bohemians.” The man
who “adored celebrities” had a lasting impact on
American letters and made deliberate efforts to
preserve the legacies of the Harlem Renaissance.
As historian Bruce Kellner notes, Van Vechten es-
tablished several major archival collections of
Harlem Renaissance materials including the well-
known James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collec-
tion of Negro Art and Letters at YALEUNIVERSITY
and collections of manuscripts and photographs at
FISKUNIVERSITY, the University of New Mexico,
and HOWARDUNIVERSITY.Bibliography
Bernard, Emily, ed. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters
of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.New York:
Knopf, 2001.
Byrd, Rudolph, ed. Generations in Black and White: Pho-
tographs by Carl Van Vechten.Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1993.
Kellner, Bruce. Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Lerman, Leo. “Dance: June Walk.” New York Times, 18
June 1961, X15.
———. Letters of Carl Van Vechten.New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue.New
York: Knopf, 1981.
Lueders, Edward. Carl Van Vechten.New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1964.
———. Carl Van Vechten and the Twenties.Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1955.
Mauriber, Saul, comp. Portraits: The Photography of Carl
Van Vechten.Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978.
Wirth, Thomas, ed. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance:
Selections from the work of Richard Bruce Nugent.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.Van Vechten, Fania Marinoff(1890–1971)
The second wife of CARLVANVECHTEN, one of
the most energetic, enterprising figures of the
Harlem Renaissance. Marinoff, a native of Odessa,Van Vechten, Fania Marinoff 543