See larger photo
| Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
     
[Click on the appropriate flag to buy the book] | Product Details
Paperback
400 pages
Vintage
Published 2002
Amazon.com
When their correspondence began in 1925, Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was the nation's leading Caucasian enthusiast for African American culture, and Langston Hughes (1902-67) was a struggling poet who lived with his mother in Washington, D.C., and plaintively closed one letter, "Remember me to Harlem." Over the four-decade-long friendship that's captured engagingly in these warm, funny letters, Hughes would become more famous, and Van Vechten less so, but their mutual affection and respect only would deepen. Editor Emily Bernard, a professor at Smith College, sensibly decided to include only a fraction of the letters that the pair exchanged, but to print those in their entirety, so that readers might get a vivid sense of each man's personality. Van Vechten is lighthearted, flirtatious, gossipy, effusive in his appreciation for Hughes' writing, and frank when he finds it not to his taste. Despite his unflinching commitment to civil rights, he's considerably less political than Hughes, whose equally witty correspondence has an underlying seriousness that's commensurate with a personal history that's far more turbulent and painful than that of his affluent friend. They share a dislike for "uplift-the-race" sanctimoniousness and a zest for African American folk culture; their letters are rife with references to the music of Bessie Smith and other great blues singers, as well as to the many Harlem Renaissance artists who were their personal acquaintances. The correspondence also provides a sustained chronicle of the working writer's life: they swap news of assignments and story ideas; Van Vechten generously makes his book-publishing and magazine contacts available to Hughes; and the poet loyally defends his friend's controversial novel, Nigger Heaven, against its numerous detractors. Helpfully, everyone is identified in Bernard's copious footnotes, which make this a handy reference work, as well as a delightful record of an extraordinary relationship between two uniquely gifted figures in American letters. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
As the Harlem Renaissance unfolded in the 1920s, few were closer to its hub than the black poet and playwright Langston Hughes and his white friend and mentor, the writer, photographer and patron of the arts Carl Van Vechten. They met in 1924, as Hughes was first exploding into literary celebrity, and quickly became friends and correspondents; between them, they knew everyone of note among Harlem's cultural figures. Marked by a shared irreverence and taste for the good life, their correspondence... read more --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless.
Despite their differences - Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met-Hughes' and Van Vechten's shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone - from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. It's a correspondence that, as Emily Bernard notes in her introduction, provides "an unusual record of entertainment, politics, and culture as seen through the eyes of two fascinating and irreverent men. |
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Critical Assessment (Studies in African American History and Culture)
Leon Coleman |  |
|
The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten
Keith F. Davis; Van Vechten (Photographer); & Hallmark Cards Inc. |  |
|
Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem
Robert Dowling (Author) |  |
|
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964
Langston Hughes; Van Vechten; & Emily Bernard (Editor) |  |
|
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
Langston Hughes; Van Vechten; & Emily Bernard (Editor) |  |
|
A Bibliography of the Work of Carl Van Vechten
Bruce Kellner |  |
|
The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930
Van Vechten; & Bruce Kellner (Editor) |  |
|
Nigger Heaven
Van Vechten; & Kathleen Pfeiffer (Introduction) |  |
|
The Tiger in the House
Carl Van Vechten |  |
|
Flashes of Genius: African American Portraits by Carl Van Vechten: A Book of Postcards
Carl Van Vechten |  |
| | | |
LuminousLint 
@LuminousLint