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.
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