The Reviewer started in 1921 as a literary journal led by Emily Clark and Hunter Stagg. After sensing there was a gap in literary criticism and short-form fiction in Richmond, they began soliticing submissions to The Reviewer, with aims to make Richmond literary again like when Edgar Allen Poe was there in the 1830s (Wise 148). It is perhaps not surprising that The Reviewer was initially headquarted at the site of the freshly minted Poe "shrine" founded by Mrs. Archer Jones. 

In his book on James Branch Cabell, Edgar E. MacDonald writes the following about The Reviewer's founding members:

“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 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. This literary magazine gave Cabell a new voice and introduced him to the woman who became his second wife.” (215-216)

After The Reviewer had published several southern authors to mixed success, Emily Clark sought to try to bring in northern authors to bring fresh perspectives. The journal had a reputation as an eccentric or "liberal" magazine and they leaned fully in when Clark decided to trust the feedback of modernist author Joseph Hergesheimer "who suggested she publish more cosmopolitan figures, such as Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein" (Wise 150). Clark reached out to Van Vechten at the end of 1921 and within a few months, Van Vechten was publishing the first of his "Pastiches et Pistaches", a series on a variety of random subjects that had been turned down by other publishers already. Van Vechten favorably recalls his introduction to Emily Clark andThe Reviewer on a retrospective piece about Joseph Hergesheimer shown here:


“I still recall with a kind of wistful awe the shell flowers under glass bells a yard high which surmounted the broad mantel-shelf. Tawny-haired, super-slender Emily Clark, whose appearance caused me to acclaim her immediately as the “daughter of Sarah Bernhardt by a leopard,” was a fellow guest and it was then that she persuaded both Joe and me to write for the Reviewer, a magazine that she handed to the surprised and unprepared inhabitants of Richmond, Virginia, to the pages of which Joe and I were to contribute lavishly during the ensuing months and years. ”

The first of The Reviewer's two major editors, Emily Clark, was a local journalist and critic who found herself unemployed in 1920, so she, along with others, started The Reviewer to keep the Richmond literary tradition alive. She first met Van Vechten in New York in early 1923, but, according to his daybooks, she would return to NYC to meet with Van Vechten dozens of times in the 1920s as their friendship extended beyond merely Richmond and The Reviewer. She would later detail the founding of The Reviewer and relay anecdotes from its time in her book titled Innocence Abroad. In this retrospective piece shown here, Emily Clark Balch, now married and widowed, reflects 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.'" 

The other primary editor of The Reviewer was Hunter Stagg, a local author who would prove to be one of the most important connections between Van Vechten and Mark Lutz. Though Emily Clark was Van Vechten's first contact with The Reviewer, critics such as Edgar MacDonald suggest Van Vechten often came to Richmond "lured by his passing interest in handsome, amusing Hunter Stagg" (275) and that Van Vechten "had become Stagg's patron saint" (253). Like with the Lutz materials, there aren't any evidences in our collection of any explicit romantic relationship between the two, but given the time period, one can make inferences. Bruce Kellner, Van Vechten's biographer, describes Stagg as "wealthy, high strung, handsome and homosexual, one of CVV's group of jeunes gens assortis" (Daybooks 29).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he became a close friend and mentor to Mark Lutz as they worked together on the Richmond Academy News. Here we have one of his reviews of the new Ellen Glasgow novel. 

While Van Vechten forged strong friendships with the editors of The Reviewer, Emily Clark and Hunter Stagg, following his submissions to their journal, he also used his new Richmond connections to meet notable authors that he idolized in Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell. 

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.