Van Vechten by Miguel Covarrubias
Many of the author photographs in this encyclopedia are Van Vechten’s. He had introduced the illustrator Miguel Covarrubias to editors when he first arrived in New York, and Covarrubias later introduced him to photography. At Covarrubias’s suggestion, Van Vechten bought his first Leica 35mm camera in 1932 and immediately began a series of protraits of his friends and acquaintances in the arts, and he continued photographing into the 1950s. His portraits are on the pages here for Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Atherton, Josephine Baker, Albert C. Barnes, Konrad Bercovici, William Stanley Braithwaite, Louis Bromfield, James Branch Cabell, Willa Cather, George M. Cohan, Padraic Colum, Miguel Covarrubias, Malcolm Cowley, Countee Cullen, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Fannie Hurst, Zora Neale Hurston, Robinson Jeffers, George Gershwin, Christopher Isherwood, James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Robert Morss Lovett, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, H.L. Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Robeson, George Schuyler, Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, and Alexander Woollcott. The quality is a bit uneven, and they are all slightly out of date for 1925—ranging from the 1930s on.
Photographs below are of people mentioned elsewhere who don’t have their own entries.
Salvador Dali, Arna Bontemps, Anna May Wong
Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Bennet Cerf, George Gershwin
Julia Peterkin, Ethel Waters, Elmer Rice
Alfred and Blanche Knopf; Salvador Dali and Man Ray
Bill Robinson, Henri Matisee, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera