Most of the readers--black as well as white--who made Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven a best-selling novel in 1926 were unaware that his interest in the creative achievements of Afro-Americans had begun before the turn of the century. He had been writing essays, evaluating plays and books, and producing program notes and dust-jacket blurbs about black artists and for black artists for more than a decade when Nigger Heaven appeared, and he had delighted in the performances of black entertainers for more than thirty years. Van Vechten's support brought undeniably mixed results, as did the efforts of earlier sympathetic white reviewers and patrons. William Dean Howells, for example, had good intentions when he reviewed Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry, but he solidified Dunbar's reputation as a dialect poet, a label Dunbar tried desperately and unsuccessfully to shake. In the 1920s the problem intensified; the black artist was torn between well-meaning...