American writer, photographer and critic Carl Van Vechten was BOTD in 1880. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a wealthy middle-class family, he studied at the University of Chicago, beginning his professional career as a columnist for the Chicago American. In 1906, he became assistant music critic for the New York Times, taking a leave of absence the following year to travel through Europe. Returning to New York in 1909, he became obsessed with avant-garde art and dance, attending early performances of Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova. In 1913, he returned to Paris and met writer Gertrude Stein, championing her writing in the United States and eventually becoming her literary executor. While in Paris, he also attended the premiere of the Ballet Russes’ modernist ballet The Rite of Spring , defending the work and its creators Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky as geniuses. Returning to New York, he became heavily involved in the Harlem Renaissance, befriending and supporting many of the movement’s key writers including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston and is credited with popularising Black culture and nightlife for white audiences. Unusually for the time, he and his second wife Fania Marinoff socialised freely in Harlem, hosting their Black celebrity friends at their home. In 1926, he squandered much of his goodwill by publishing the novel Nigger Heaven, a thinly veiled satire of his experiences in Harlem. Though publicly supported by Larsen and Hughes, the book’s provocative title and descriptions of Black performers as sexually voracious hedonists caused a scandal, and was criticised by Black intellectuals W. E. B. Du Bois and Wallace Thurman. In later life, van Vechten developed an impressive second career as a photographer, making portraits of most of the key literary and artistic figures of his time, including Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, Stein, W. H. Auden, Tallulah Bankhead, James Baldwin, Paul and Jane Bowles, Marlon Brando, Paul Cadmus, Truman Capote, Katharine Cornell, John van Druten, John Gielgud, Billie Holiday, Christopher Isherwood, Philip Johnson, Eartha Kitt, W. Somerset Maugham, Laurence Olivier, César Romero, Bessie Smith, Gore Vidal, Ethel Waters, Evelyn Waugh and Anna May Wong. Van Vechten and Marinoff had an open marriage, allowing him to pursue long-term relationships with Mark Lutz and Prentiss Taylor, mixing in a largely homosexual social circle including Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford and Cecil Beaton. He died in 1964 aged 84. Interest in his life and work was revived during the 1970s gay liberation movement, though his reputation has suffered since because of his perceived exploitation of African-American culture and sexual stereotyping of his Black subjects.