Aiming to reinvigorate criticism and short-form fiction in Richmond four local writers launched a new literary journal, The Reviewer, in 1921. Signaling both their inspiration and their aspirations, they headquartered the journal at the site of the freshly-minted Poe "shrine" in Shockoe Bottom just east of downtown, today the site of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Wise 148).  

Somewhat uncharitably, historian Edgar E. MacDonald argues that The Reviewer's editors’ motivations stemmed from their personal financial and social frustrations:

“Fortunately for Richmond’s literary history, the four ‘editors’ of the Reviewer suffered from varying social liabilities. Emily Clark, daughter of a deceased Episcopal clergyman, was long on family, short on money, and devoid of beauty. Margaret Freeman was the outspoken, overly positive daughter of a Methodist bigot and a mother sensitive to a restrictive social position. Mary Dallas Street was from a monied family but was a large masculine, red-faced woman termed by younger contemporaries 'Mr.' Street. Hunter Taylor Stagg, darkly handsome, subject to seizures from a near-fatal head wound at the age of seven, was a younger son of a father sinking into financial straits. All four knew and associated with the ‘best people’ in Richmond but were excluded from the inner circle based on family, money, and personal beauty, and consequently turned to cultural interests. Thus four social misfits joined forces to bring the Reviewer into being.” (215-216)

The Reviewer would prove instrumental in nurturing Richmond’s modernist literary scene and, eventually, connecting it to that of New York through writer, photographer, and critic Carl Van Vechten.

While the Reviewer certainly had a southern bent, from its inception it was always in conversation with American modernism—and American modernists. Carl Van Vechten began to write for the Reviewer in 1922 after being pitched by Emily Clark at a party at the West Chester, Pennsylvania, home of modernist novelist Joseph Hergesheimer (who also wrote for the journal). From this modest start, Van Vechten’s connections with the Richmond literary circle being forged through the Reviewer would deepen in subsequent decades. 

Conveying both the genuinely experimental nature of the work in the Reviewer and the condescending attitude towards southerners and southern culture among northern literati, Van Vechten later claimed that the readers of Richmond were both “surprised” by and “unprepared” for what they would encounter in its pages.

The idea to create the Reviewer had been the product of conversations at an earlier party. Clark was a local journalist and critic. Finding herself unemployed in 1920, she seized on this idea and served as the lead editor of the journal for most of its short life. 

Her initial meeting with Van Vechten and publication of his work grew into a friendship. As detailed in his daybooks, Clark traveled to New York and met with him dozens of times in the 1920s. 

Clark would later detail the founding of the Reviewer and relay anecdotes from its time in her book Innocence Abroad. In this retrospective piece shown here, Emily Clark Balch, who had subsequently married and been widowed, reflected saying: "Of the first issue Mrs. Balch says, 'It was the funniest thing you ever saw' and Ellen Glasgow, who was one of her early contributors, remarked: ''With sufficient youth and innocence you may be able to put it over.'"

Van Vechten would travel to Richmond too. Visiting Clark, critic Edward MacDonald suggests, might have been less of a draw than another of the Reviewer’s editors, the “handsome, amusing Hunter Stagg” (275). While the University of Richmond’s collection does not contain any explicit mention of a romantic relationship between the two, Van Vechten's biographer Bruce Kellner describes Stagg as "wealthy, high strung, handsome and homosexual” who was  “one of CVV's group of jeunes gens assortis" (Daybooks 29).

While Van Vechten forged strong friendships with the editors of The Reviewer he also used his new Richmond connections to meet local authors that he idolized.

Ellen Glasgow, the first of these connections, was a southern author who called Richmond, which she referred to in her novels as Queensborough, home. Glasgow showed Van Vechten around Richmond on his first visit including a trip to hear the "Sabbath Glee Club" which he would write about for The Reviewer. Glasgow was Richmond literary society's "queen bee" and hosted formal dinners often attended by the staff and writers for The Reviewer (Kellner 164). In his description of the city of Richmond for the Yale University Library Gazette, he jokingly described the city as "disappointing" but praised Glasgow's home as "the best, of [Richmond's] pre-War, pre-fire glamour" (Van Vechten 6). Later, when Gertrude Stein visited Richmond, Van Vechten requested that Glasgow host a party at her home to show off the Richmond literary culture.

Shown here is a review of Glasgow's newest book by Carl Van Vechten for the New York Herald-Tribune. 

Along with Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell was the other notable author who resided in Richmond that Van Vechten connected with. Cabell is the Southern author perhaps with the most name recognition in Richmond, due partially to his name gracing the VCU library, but he was held in high regard by his contemporaries with Gertrude Stein saying he was the only literary person living in Richmond (Mellow 399). On his first visit to Richmond in 1923, Van Vechten was welcomed to a party at Cabell's home, named Dumbarton, where he was initiated into Richmond literary society. Though Cabell and Van Vechten were of similar ages and the same generation, their political and social outlooks varied wildly. Despite this, Van Vechten held Cabell in high regard, taking his photograph in 1935 (shown here), and writing in a 1921 letter "my principal sensation this morning is that I have received a letter from James Branch Cabell in which he refers to a paper of mine as 'very beautiful.' For the present I ask nothing more" (Between Friends 236).

Though Van Vechten was coming to Richmond for a variety of reasons in the 1920s—The Reviewer, fellow notable authors in Cabell or Glasgow, or one of his handsome jeunes gens assortis—the 1930s is when he met Mark Lutz who became his primary interest in the city. Lutz was a University of Richmond alumnus and journalist who was connected to the staff at The Reviewer by living next door to Emily Clark and met Van Vechten through them in the summer of 1931. Though Van Vechten and Lutz wished to have their thirty-three years of daily correspondence destroyed upon their passing, their relationship was among Van Vechten's closest. Their partnership remained an important artistic one even when it was no longer sexual in nature as Lutz assisted Van Vechten in his photography that became his primary artistic medium in the 1930s. Just a few years after meeting Lutz, Van Vechten invited him on a 1934 trip to Europe to photograph several notable figures and to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Bilignin, France. Lutz would also be instrumental in bringing Stein and Toklas to the University of Richmond on their American tour. Following his death, Lutz donated this collection, the Carl Van Vechten - Mark Lutz Collection, to the University of Richmond, his alma mater. 

Unlike the other authors featured here, Gertrude Stein is not a Richmond native, but her connection to the city through Carl Van Vechten starts nearly a decade before she even visits the city. Van Vechten functioned as Stein's de facto literary agent, landing a permanent publishing location at Random House and boosting her acclaim by reviewing her books positively (Kellner 264). After Van Vechten began writing for The Reviewer, he landed the editors some "European flair" by bringing in his friends Ronald Firbank and Gertrude Stein to contribute pieces. One of Stein's pieces, 'An Indian Boy', was controversial amongst the Virginia readers of The Reviewer, leading to some subscription cancellations (Leick 94). After Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published and her popularity grew, she made an American tour to speak at universities and both Van Vechten and Lutz ensured that Richmond was on the list. In addition to parties at the homes of James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow, Stein visited the Edgar Allan Poe museum, the statues on Monument Avenue, and Libbey Prison. 

"We were going to Richmond. We were going to the University of Virginia and William and Mary and the University of Richmond and then later we found out about Sweet Briar and we went there. We were going to see Virginia. After all that can mean anything or something to any American.” (Stein 244)

From the very first time that Carl Van Vechten visited Richmond, he publicly had multiple derogatory comments on the town calling it a "very ugly town" in his published daybooks (38) and "physically one of the most disappointing of cities" in his piece on James Branch Cabell for the Yale Library Gazette (6). However, his public comments differ from his alleged sentiments as he later reflected on Richmond calling it a "delectable town" (Between Friends xii) and telling Hunter Stagg that it was "adorable" (MacDonald 255). On one of his first visits to Richmond, Ellen Glasgow recommended that he go and hear The Sabbath Glee Club which moved him enough to write the piece shown here and give him a memory that he'd tie to the city and the literary group for the rest of his life. Though Van Vechten never lived in Richmond, he considered himself a part of the literary society here and formed a community with the other local authors. In his preface to Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others, Van Vechten summarized his connection to the group: 

“I recall an old definition of a literary clique: ten or a dozen authors who live in the same town and who hate each other cordially. This was not true of our group in the Twenties. Many of us did not live in New York, but we at least attempted to love one another. We frequently dined together, wrote each other sporadically or often, according to the interest involved, and sometimes reviewed each other’s books. Occasionally we visited together in our respective towns. Actually, it was the nearest approximation to a group that had existed since Hawthorne’s day, and certainly there is nothing like it today when occasionally you see a single author struggling with his peers at a cocktail party.” (xv)

For those interested in learning more about Carl Van Vechten, we encourage you to check out the remaining resources we have in our  Carl Van Vechten - Mark Lutz Collection.This exhibit barely scratched the surface of the hundreds of items held there. 

Live in Richmond and planning a trip to campus? Look through the finding aid and contact a member of the BAARB team to get a look at the physical items held in the collection. 

If you have borrowing privileges through the University of Richmond, we have the cited sources linked below with digital or physical access through Boatwright Memorial Library.

Works Cited: 

Cabell, James Branch, et al. Between Friends; Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others. Edited by Padriac Colum and Margaret Freeman Cabell. With an Introd. by Carl Van Vechten. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

Kellner, Bruce. Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Leick, Karen. Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity. Routledge, 2009.

MacDonald, Edgar E. James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia. University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Mellow, James Robert. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company. Praeger, 1974.

Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Random house, 1937.

Van Vechten, Carl. “MR. CABELL OF LICHFIELD AND POICTESME BY CARL VAN VECHTEN.” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 23, no. 1, July 1948, pp. 1–7.

Van Vechten, Carl, and Bruce. Kellner. The Splendid Drunken Twenties : Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930 / Carl Van Vechten ; Edited by Bruce Kellner. University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Wise, Benjamin E. “‘An Experiment in Southern Letters’: Reconsidering the Role of the Reviewer in the Southern Renaissance.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 113, no. 2, January 2005, pp. 146–78.