These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figυres of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten-older, established, and white-was at first a mentor tο the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship-and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly.
They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics ("So now Ι know what Bessie Smith really meant by “Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wall,'" Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges). They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common - James Baldwin, W Ε. Β. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekkihg across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection.