Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a key advocate for modernism across the arts in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a critic of music, dance, and literature, as novelist, as photographer, as patron of the arts, and as saloniste, he exerted an influence on the development and reception of popular and avant-garde forms of modernism – from jazz, blues, and early cinema to Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky. Though currently less well-known than ‘Lost Generation’ contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Van Vechten was a popular and critically acclaimed figure in his day. Van Vechten’s novels are worthy of recuperation for their distinctive take on the raucous spirit of the Jazz Age, bringing a witty and sardonic viewpoint to issues that his modernist contemporaries approached with gravity. This edition brings back into print Van Vechten’s second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), which his most recent biographer has called a ‘great, forgotten American novel of the 1920s’. It is thoroughly annotated and provides an introduction that foregrounds the novel’s importance for literary modernism and as a treatment of queer identity.

Story of the education of a youth whose father is determined that his son shall not suffer any of his own disadvantages.

A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.Edward White's biography—the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality—depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel—and especially its title—infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste—modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression—created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.