Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.

[5] After high school, Van Vechten was eager to take the next steps in his life, but found it difficult to pursue his passions in Iowa.

He began to frequently attend groundbreaking musical premieres at the time when Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City.

[8] They continued corresponding for the remainder of Stein's life, and, at her death, she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor; he helped to bring into print her unpublished writings.

[9] Van Vechten wrote a piece called "How to Read Gertrude Stein" for the arts magazine The Trend.

[8] Van Vechten kept a circle of handsome young men around him, including Donald Angus, Jimmie Daniels, Max Ewing, and Prentiss Taylor.

[16] Van Vechten promoted many of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman.

Biographer Edward White suggests Van Vechten was convinced that negro culture was the essence of America.

[2] Van Vechten played a critical role in the Harlem Renaissance and helped to bring greater clarity to the African-American movement.

In Van Vechten's early writings, he claimed that black people were born to be entertainers and sexually "free".

In other words, he believed that black people should be free to explore their sexuality and singers should follow their natural talents such as jazz, spirituals and blues.

[16] Van Vechten wrote about his experiences of attending a Bessie Smith concert at the Orpheum Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, in 1925.

He was credited for the surge in white interest in Harlem nightlife and culture as well as involved in helping well-respected writers such as Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen to find publishers for their early works.

[18] In 2001, Emily Bernard published "Remember Me to Harlem", which is a collection of letters that documents the long friendship between Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, who publicly defended Nigger Heaven.

[16] His older brother Ralph Van Vechten died on June 28, 1927; when Ralph's widow Fannie died in 1928, Van Vechten inherited $1 million invested in a trust fund, which was unaffected by the stock market crash of 1929 and provided financial support for Carl and Fania.

[2]: 242–244 [19] By 1930, at the age of 50, Van Vechten was finished with writing[20] and took up photography, using his apartment at 150 West 55th Street as a studio, where he photographed many notable people.

[8] His book The Tiger in the House explores the quirks and qualities of Van Vechten's most beloved animal, the cat.

He intended for this novel to depict how African Americans were living in Harlem and not about the suffering of blacks in the South who were dealing with racism and lynchings.

Alain Locke sent Van Vechten a letter from Berlin citing his novel Nigger Heaven and the excitement surrounding its release as his primary reason for making an imminent return home.

In 1981, David Levering Lewis, historian and author of a classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, called Nigger Heaven a "colossal fraud", a seemingly uplifting book with a message that was overshadowed by "the throb of the tom-tom".

[2]: 284 The Philadelphia Museum of Art currently holds one of the largest collection of photographs by Van Vechten in the United States.

Included in the collection are images from extensive portrait sessions with figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, and Cab Calloway; artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Gaston Lachaise,[30] Joan Miró, and Frida Kahlo; and countless other actors, musicians, and cultural figures.

[31] In 1980, concerned that Van Vechten's fragile 35 mm nitrate negatives were fast deteriorating, photographer Richard Benson, in conjunction with the Eakins Press Foundation, transformed 50 of the portraits into handmade gravure prints.