Download Free Peter Whiffle Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Peter Whiffle and write the review.

Peter Whiffle (1922) is a novel by Carl Van Vechten. Framing himself as his character’s literary executor, Van Vechten provides a satirical self portrait of his unusual life in the arts through the lens of a man whose sole gift is to identify and move with the avant-garde. Peter Whiffle is a writer who never writes. Throughout his travels, he claims to be researching for an important work of literature but mostly provides humorous portraits of some of the greatest artists, dancers, and writers of his time. In this way, he proves himself much more of a mirror than a window—like Van Vechten likely sensed of his own writing, Whiffle is a man who reflects the success and genius of others much more than he offers his own. Travelling between New York City and Europe, Whiffle becomes a figure who defines his generation through keen wit and tongue-in-cheek wisdom, a tour guide to a vast land of cultural creation and bohemian excess. Peter Whiffle, Van Vechten’s debut novel, is a fascinating work of fiction from a man who was always one step ahead of the rest. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
This book explores the relationship between literary politics and the politics of place in fin-de-siècle travel and place-based literature.
The first scholarly comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of difference.
This book provides a fresh assessment of the works of British-born poet and painter Mina Loy. Laura Scuriatti shows how Loy’s “eccentric” writing and art celebrate ideas and aesthetics central to the modernist movement while simultaneously critiquing them, resulting in a continually self-reflexive and detached stance that Scuriatti terms “critical modernism.” Drawing on archival material, Scuriatti illuminates the often-overlooked influence of Loy’s time spent amid Italian avant-garde culture. In particular, she considers Loy’s assessment of the nature of genius and sexual identity as defined by philosopher Otto Weininger and in Lacerba, a magazine founded by Giovanni Papini. She also investigates Loy’s reflections on the artistic masterpiece in relation to the world of commodities; explores the dialogic nature of the self in Loy’s autobiographical projects; and shows how Loy used her “eccentric” stance as a political position, especially in her later career in the United States. Offering new insights into Loy’s feminism and tracing the writer’s lifelong exploration of themes such as authorship, art, identity, genius, and cosmopolitanism, this volume prompts readers to rethink the place, value, and function of key modernist concepts through the critical spaces created by Loy’s texts.
This generous, representative sampling from the daybooks of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most significant figures of the Harlem Renaissance, is a rich resource and major reference tool for reconstructing the culture of 1920s New York, the social milieu during Prohibition, and more. Bruce Kellner has provided copious, informative 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.
A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.Edward White's biography—the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality—depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel—and especially its title—infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste—modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression—created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson are known as much for their formidable egos as for their contributions to twentieth-century arts. That either could collaborate intimately with anyone is surprising. Yet Stein and Thomson did work together, magnificently so, most notably on the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts and the fanciful The Mother of Us All. This annotated collection of correspondence reveals the spark that existed between the two American masters over the course of their sometimes rocky friendship. The roughly 400 letters written between 1926-1946 record the fascinating nature of their partnership-their mutual excitement over evolving projects and their process for bringing together two often radical aesthetic sensibilities. The style of the letters is careful and forceful when the relationship is strained, but most often it is relaxed and affectionate. As a record of friendship the letters are particularly compelling, replete with love, support, and mutual fascination. Not surprisingly, the correspondence is stylistically remarkable-Stein being arguably the most innovative literary modernist and Thomson the author of crisp, insightful, irreverent music criticism, the most quoted of his century. In addition to their artistic partnership, the letters provide a revealing glimpse into their individual careers in the realms of literature and music, as they document a web of mutual friendships and the vibrant artistic community of the early twentieth century. The editors' notes contextualize this valuable exchange and add a layer of richness and accessibility. The volume will interest readers, critics, and scholars in music, literature, avant garde arts and modern culture more generally.
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987) was a writer, painter, illustrator, and popular bohemian personality who lived at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. Protégé of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. His contribution to the landmark publication FIRE!!, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” was unprecedented in its celebration of same-sex desire. A resident of the notorious “Niggeratti Manor,” Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933) Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent’s during the last years of the artist’s life, has assembled a selection of Nugent’s most important writings, paintings, and drawings—works mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications and collected here for the first time. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent’s life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents which influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizes the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture.