The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930 - Hardcover

Carl Van Vechten; Bruce Kellner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252028481 ISBN 13: 9780252028489

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2003

Synopsis

This representative sampling from the daybooks of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most significant figures of the Harlem Renaissance, is a resource and reference tool for reconstructing the culture of 1920s New York and the social milieu during Prohibition. Bruce Kellner has provided notes identifying central figures and clarifying details.
Between 1922 and 1930, Van Vechten kept a daily record of his activities. Not exactly diaries, but more than appointment books, the daybooks record his daily comings and goings as well as the alliances, drinking habits, feuds, and affairs of a wide number of luminaries of the period. They catalog tales of bootlegging, literary teas, shifting cliques of artists and writers, cabaret slumming, sexual and social peccadilloes, and a seemingly endless sequence of parties.

About this title

About the Author

BRUCE KELLNER is Professor of English at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, where he teaches Shakespeare and Afro-American literature.

Review

"This unique document stands alone in its monumental recordings of the comings, goings, and doings of a diverse and fascinating group of prominent writers, artists, publishers, actors, producers, activists, and more. With his painstaking editing and annotation, Kellner has done a tremendous service to all scholars of the period." -- Thadious Davis, author of Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0252028481
• ISBN 13: 9780252028489
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384