The first epistolary novel written by an African-American, it was originally serialized in the radical magazine The Messenger between January 1925 and July 1926 as "The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair."

As Davy gets to know the various members of the social scene, he becomes more and more suspicious of his fellow lodger, Jeffries, whose questionable activities include attending seedy cabarets, and may extend to theft or money laundering.

[1] Davy is a light-skinned man who elects not to pass for white, and throughout the novel he and other characters discuss the tendencies of many African-American men (of any shade) to prefer women of lighter skin tones.

Adam McKible identified the literary and historical merit of the novel while researching his dissertation,[1] and followed the trail of authorship to Edward Christopher Williams, the head librarian at Howard University from 1916 to 1929.

[4] As almost certainly the first epistolary novel written by an African-American,[1] When Washington Was in Vogue establishes Williams as a Harlem Renaissance writer, and as an innovator in the African American literary canon.

Publishers Weekly heralded it as "an invaluable addition to period scholarship",[6] while a laudatory review in The Crisis said the novel was "a welcome and consistently entertaining glimpse of a pivotal era".