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

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.