Celebrity photographer Carl Van Vechten

It is the birthday of 1920s celeb photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880), who made portraits of actors, singers, artists, and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, including some of the most prominent personalities in the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten was assistant music critic for The New York Times, and later served as its first modern dance critic. He also wrote seven novels, including Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Red (1925), Firecrakers: A Realistic Novel (1925), Nigger Heaven (1926), and Parties (1930). He was a lifelong friend of Gertrude Stein and served as the literary executor of her estate.

Happy birthday, Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer and radical activist Max Eastman (1883), a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and co-founder of the radical magazine The Liberator in 1919. Earlier, as editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, Eastman stood trial twice on charges of sedition for editorials critical of U.S. participation in World War I. He was acquitted both times. The Liberator published works of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings. Eastman visited Russia in the 1920s and later wrote critically of Joseph Stalin, though he supported Leon Trotsky. Later in life, he became fiercely anti-socialist and anti-communist, and an outspoken conservative.

Carl Van Vechten photographed celebs

It is the birthday of writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880), who is best remembered for his photographs of celebrity writers, artists, singers and actors in the 1920s and 1930s. He was particularly fascinated with the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten worked as assistant music critic for The New York Times and later as its first modern dance critic. He wrote seven novels, including Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Red (1925), Firecrakers: A Realistic Novel (1925), Nigger Heaven (1926), and Parties (1930). He met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1913 and remained a lifelong friend. He became the literary executor of her estate and published some of her unpublished writings. Collections of his photographs are at Yale University, Fisk University, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Happy birthday, Countee Cullen

It is the birthday of poet Countee Cullen (1903), one of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance. His name was pronounced "Coun-tay." One of his best known poems is Yet Do I Marvel, the last line of which reads: "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" Cullen published several poetry collections, including Color (1925), Harlem Wine (1926), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), and The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Cullen wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932)  and an autobiography of his cat, My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942). Cullen emulated John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and was influenced by William Wordsworth and William Blake.

Fisher wrote during Harlem Renaissance

It is the birthday of writer Rudolph Fisher (1897), who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance as a novelist and short-story writer. He is best remembered for his novel The Walls of Jericho (1928), which realistically depicted black urban life, and for writing the first detective novel with all black characters, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), which includes a mysterious murder, hidden identities, and exotic African rituals. He was considered the most gifted short-story writer of the Harlem Renaissance, writing of Southern blacks adjusting to urban life in Harlem. Among his short stories are City of Refuge, High Yaller, The South Lingers On, Blades of Steel, and Miss Cynthie.

Max Eastman was left before he was right

Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer Max Eastman (1883), who was a prominent political activist, first for left-wing causes, then later for right-wing, anti-Communist movements. In later life, he described himself as a radical conservative. He was an avid supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. When he was 30, Eastman became editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. In his late 50s, he became a roving editor for Reader's Digest. In his 70s, he was a contributing editor to the conservative National Review.

Eastman was born in upstate New York to parents who were protestant ministers. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1915 and pursued a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University but withdrew before accepting it. He studied under pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. Eastman lived in Greenwich Village with his sister and became active in the women's suffrage movement.

As editor of The Masses, he published the work of novelist Sherwood Anderson, Marxist Louise Bryant, poets Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, and Taos arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. He advocated free love and birth control, denounced America's participation in World War I, and supported socialist Jack Reed's trip to Russia to report on the Bolshevik Revolution. He created, with his sister, The Liberator magazine and published the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Helen Keller. He lived for almost two years in the Soviet Union and watched the power plays between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. He became Trotsky's friend. But his views of socialism began to change after his visit to Soviet Russia.

During the Depression, Eastman became critical of such socialist thinkers Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He became friends with British economist Friedrich Hayek and arranged for his book The Road to Serfdom (1943) to be serialized in Reader's Digest. At first, he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist activism, but later criticized him as being too reactionary. Nevertheless, he grew to believe the Bolshevik Revolution had produced tyranny instead of freedom. Eastman was among the first contributing editors for the National Review and served on its Board of Associates but he eventually resigned because the magazine's pro-Christian leanings didn't jibe with his atheism. Eastman opposed the Vietnam War.

Among his books and articles are Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), The Sense of Humor (1921), Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1925), Since Lenin Died (1925), Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution (1927), Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), and Seven Kinds of Goodness (1967).

Fannie Hurst befriended Zora Hurston

Fannie Hurst

It is the birthday of novelist Fannie Hurst (1889), who is best remembered for Imitation of Life (1933), her book on race relations in the United States in the early part of the 20th century, and for sponsoring writer Zora Neale Hurston's first year at Barnard College and hiring Hurston as her executive secretary. By all accounts, Hurston was a terrible secretary but the two remained friends for years.

Hurst's involvement during the Harlem Renaissance and her support of African Americans seem to eclipse her literary career among scholars today, though in her heyday she was popular and widely read. By 1925, she became one of the highest paid writers in America. Imitation of Life was adapted for a 1934 film starring Claudette Colbert, and it was remade in 1959 starring Lana Turner.

She is widely considered to have been a mediocre writer, given to clunky metaphors like "The days were transmission belts under her feet, moving her along." In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald criticized Hurst as being among several writers "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 20 years." She was the butt of a joke in a 1970 Mel Brooks comedy The Twelve Chairs: "Hope for the best, expect the worst. You could be Tolstoy or Fannie Hurst."

Hurst was at her best with short stories. Once called the female O. Henry, she was lauded for stories like "Hattie Turner versus Hattie Turner," a story published in Cosmopolitan in 1935 that has an abused wife debating with herself over whether or not she has killed her no-good husband. In her time, she was called Queen of the Sob Sisters and admired for her accessible and sympathetic prose. Today critics say her grammar and style were abysmal.

Despite the criticism, Hurst was nothing if not persistent. Her career spanned half a century, and she produced 17 novels, nine short story collections, an autobiography, and three plays. She wrote many magazine articles, was in demand for speaking engagements and, for a year, hosted a television talk show in New York.

Among Hurst's books are Stardust: The Story of an American Girl (1921), Lummox (1923), Mannequin (1926), A President is Born (1928), Five and Ten (1929), Back Street (1931), Hallelujah (1944), Anywoman (1950), The Man with One Head (1951), God Must Be Sad (1961) and Fool, Be Still (1964). Her autobiography, Anatomy of Me: A Wonderer in Search of Herself was published in 1958. Nearly 30 films were produced from her works.

Countee Cullen, Harlem Renaissance poet

Countee Cullen

It is the birthday of poet Countee Cullen (1903), who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. He started writing poetry in high school, where he helped edit the school literary magazine and served as editor of the school newspaper. He began at New York University in 1921, where he wrote most of the poems that appeared in his first three poetry volumes, Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). He was known for writing in a style that emulated John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley—sonnets and quatrains and so forth. He also was influenced by William Wordsworth and William Blake. He won several prizes for poetry during the 1920s, including one from the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, for which he served as an editor. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and entered Harvard in 1925, where he earned a masters degree. In 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, in a lavish wedding but the marriage lasted only two years. Later he taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York. He died at the age of 42. Among his best known poems is Yet Do I Marvel: I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind/And did He stoop to quibble could tell why/The little buried mole continues blind,/Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,/Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus/Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare/If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus/To struggle up a never-ending stair./Inscrutable His ways are, and immune/To catechism by a mind too strewn/With petty cares to slightly understand/What awful brains compels His awful hand./Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Langston Hughes, 1902

It is the birthday of novelist and poet Langston Hughes (1902), who figured prominently during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In grammar school, he was elected class poet, though he said that was because of the stereotype that all African Americans have rhythm. He was one of two black students in his class. He began writing in high school and discovered a love of books. He wrote for the school paper and was an editor of the yearbook. He wrote his first jazz-style poem, When Sue Wears Red, when he was in high school. His signature poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, was published in 1921. In 1925, he worked as an assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson. He wrote 16 books of poetry, 11 novels and short story collections, six non-fiction books, 12 plays (including Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston), and eight children's books.