Blind Bow-Boy

1923. With a decoration by Robert E. Locher. Van Vechten was one of the first to understand the importance of the Harlem Renaissance movement and became interested in promoting black artists and writers. He was an avid collector of ephemera and books pertaining to black arts and letters and a frequent visitor to Harlem. These experiences provided the inspiration for his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven. In the early 1930s Van Vechten was introduced to the 35 mm Leica camera. He began photographing his large circle of friends and acquaintances. Some of his subjects from this period include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude Stein. The novel begins: Harold Prewett sat in the broad, black-walnut seat of an ambiguous piece of furniture which branched above, in spreading antlers, into a rack for coats and hats and which below, at either side, provided means for the disposition of canes and umbrellas. The mere presence of these heavy, sullen antlers was sufficiently dispiriting to increase the gloomy atmosphere which environed the young man. The room in which he sat waiting was a hallway. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.