When Washington Was in Vogue: A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance - Softcover

Edward Christopher Williams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060555467 ISBN 13: 9780060555467

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

Nearly lost after its anonymous publication in 1926 and only recently rediscovered, When Washington Was in Vogue is an acclaimed love story written and set during the Harlem Renaissance. When bobbed-hair flappers were in vogue and Harlem was hopping, Washington, D.C., did its share of roaring, too.

Davy Carr, a veteran of the Great War and a new arrival in the nation's capital, is welcomed into the drawing rooms of the city's Black elite. Through letters, Davy regales an old friend in Harlem with his impressions of race, politics, and the state of Black America as well as his own experiences as an old-fashioned bachelor adrift in a world of alluring modern women - including sassy, dark-skinned Caroline.

With an introduction by Adam McKible and commentary by Emily Bernard, this novel, a timeless love story wonderfully enriched with the drama and style of one of the most hopeful moments in African American history, is as "delightful as it is significant" (Essence).

About this title

About the Author:

Edward Christopher Williams was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1871. He was schooled at Western Reserve University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian, and at the New York State Library School. Williams is documented as the first Black American to graduate from a library school. He was a notable scholar, a brilliant teacher, and a pivotal developer of education for librarians. He was married to Ethel Chesnutt, the daughter of Charles W. Chesnutt, author of the seminal novel The House Behind the Cedars. Williams died of a sudden illness in Washington, D.C., in 1929 at the age of fifty-eight.

From Publishers Weekly:

This lost epistolary novel of the Harlem Renaissance, originally serialized in The Messenger in 1925-1926, is slight in plot but deep in detail, an invaluable addition to period scholarship. Williams, the country's first professionally trained black librarian, aptly portrays the 1920s African-American high society of which he was a part. After WWI, army officer Davy Carr moves to Washington, D.C., to research a book on the African slave trade. Lodging at the refined home of Margaret Rhodes, he meets her two daughters: older, serious Genevieve, and irrepressible, flirtatious Caroline. Davy immerses himself in their busy society, attending dances, teas, socials and sporting events, and, as in any novel of manners, he makes detailed observations of this new world's mores, writing his findings to a friend. Although he has a fine eye for details in others' lives, Davy realizes he has been blind to his own feelings for the mischievous and darker-skinned Caroline. Williams provides a glimpse into a parallel universe of privilege in which slight variations in skin tone said everything about status, and stuffiness was de rigueur (Caroline, Davy muses, "makes not the slightest outward show of culture in her ordinary social relations, [but] she has... a perfectly uncanny fluency of speech, as I have found out to my discomfiture"). As a light-skinned man who refused to "pass," Williams had an abiding interest in intraracial tension, and the absence of white characters further dramatizes the issue. Though the story holds little suspense, McKible's discovery is sure to provoke scholarship and discussion, and attract well-deserved attention.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060555467
• ISBN 13: 9780060555467
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277