It also split the Black literary community, as some including Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen appreciated it, while others like Countee Cullen and W. E. B.

"[1] "Nigger heaven" was a term used in the 19th century to refer to church balconies, which were segregated for African Americans, as the white members of the congregation sat below; cf.

The first novella is centered on Mary Love, a young librarian who is fascinated by the diverse cultures of Harlem in which she lives, as well as its different hierarchies, and wants to belong but is unsure of her place in it.

[1] According to reviewer Kelefa Sanneh, one interpretation is that although he was a white man, he felt he had licence to use the pejorative because he had cultivated many professional and personal relationships in Harlem.

According to Sennah, Van Vechten meant the book to be a celebration of Harlem, but the title expressed the ambivalence about the place in the context of a largely segregated society.

[1] Van Vechten put the titular expression in the dialogue of one of his characters, who explained that the denizens of Harlem were stuck in the balcony of New York City, while the whites in the "good seats" downtown only occasionally and cruelly acknowledged them to laugh or sneer, but not to know them.

[7] He later addressed the text in depth in the essay "On Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven", where he called the novel "an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white.

[1] Poet Langston Hughes, a friend of Van Vechten's, would go on to write poems to replace the songs used in the original manuscript and in the first printings of the text.

Historian of the Harlem Renaissance David Levering Lewis found the book at best quaint, but calls it a "colossal fraud", with Van Vechten's motives being a "a mixture of commercialism and patronizing sympathy".

Later biographers, Emily Bernard (who nonetheless calls the title an "open wound") and especially Edward White, express more admiration for what Van Vechten attempted to do by crossing boundaries.