everyday people, with complexity and flaws just like typical white characters. The novel's supporters included Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, who all defended the novel for bringing Harlem society and racial issues to the forefront of America. His supporters also sent him letters to voice their opinions of the novel. Alain Locke sent Van Vechten a letter from Berlin citing his novel Nigger Heaven and the excitement surrounding its release as his primary reason for making an imminent return home. Gertrude Stein sent Van Vechten a letter from France writing that the novel was the best thing he had ever written. Stein also played an important role in the development of the novel. Well-known critics of this novel included African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and black novelist Wallace Thurman. Du Bois dismissed the novel as "cheap melodrama". Decades after the book was published, literary critic and scholar Ralph Ellison remembered Van Vechten as a bad influence, an unpleasant character who "introduced a note of decadence into Afro-American literary matters which was not needed". In 1981, David Levering Lewis, historian and author of a classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, called Nigger Heaven a "colossal fraud", a seemingly uplifting book with a message that was overshadowed by "the throb of the tom-tom". He viewed Van Vechten as being driven by "a mixture of commercialism and patronizing sympathy". Music After the Great War (1915) Music and Bad Manners (1916) Interpreters and Interpretations (1917) The Merry-Go-Round (1918) The Music of Spain (1918) In the Garret (1919) The Tiger in the House (1920) Lords of the Housetops (1921) Peter Whiffle (1922) The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) The Tattooed Countess (1924) Red (1925) Firecrackers. A Realistic Novel (1925) Excavations (1926) Nigger Heaven (1926) Spider Boy (1928) Parties (1930) Feathers (1930) Sacred and Profane Memories (1932) Posthumous The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten (1974) Source: Archives and museum collections Most of Van Vechten's personal papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The Beinecke Library also holds a collection titled "Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten's Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939–1964", a collection of 1,884 color Kodachrome slides. The Library of Congress has a collection of approximately 1,400 photographs which it acquired in 1966 from Saul Mauriber (May 21, 1915 – February 12, 2003). There is also a collection of Van Vechten's photographs in the Prentiss