|
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.70 You Save: $3.30 (22%)as of 12/16/2009 09:54 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN: 9780375727078
ISBN: 0375727078
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: February 05, 2002
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 05, 2002
Studio: Vintage
Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com Review:
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
Product 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.
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
Emily Bernard's REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM has to main goals. One, Bernard attempts with success to show the cordial communication between two leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance inner circle, Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. Two, Bernard hopes to reveal a friendship uncommon for the day and time it flourished, the friendship between a black man and a white man during a major period of segregation and inequality between the black and white Americans. Of course, all this is done through the ... Read More
Rating: -
What a great book. It is amazing how much correspondence reveals about people. This book was so interesting. It truly covers decades of Black artisitic history.
Rating: -
Bernard gathers and edits the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, written between 1925-64, presenting a notable work of Hughes' mentor and the friendship which evolved between the two men. From discussions of literature and the publishing world to politics and gossip, these letters hold important keys to the personalities and concerns of two great men of the Harlem Renaissance.
|
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN: 9780375727078
ISBN: 0375727078
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: February 05, 2002
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 05, 2002
Studio: Vintage