EWING, Max

Going Somewhere

First edition. Some very light chipping to the cloth at the crown, some dampstaining to both the boards and to the bottom margins of the pages, a sound, fair only copy lacking the dustwrapper. This copy Inscribed to Dorothy Peterson: "For Dorothy Peterson this book of caricature of scenes with which she is familiar, Max Ewing. January 5 - 1933." Peterson was the model for the female heroine of Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven. According to Notable Black American Women (p.842-4), "Van Vechten... modeled the heroine of the novel, Mary Love -- the beautiful librarian concerned with her racial heritage, after Dorothy Peterson." He also modeled the home of another character on her home, which was one of Harlem's most important and well-attended literary salons. Peterson, who co-founded both the Harlem Experimental Theatre and the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, also devoted herself to collecting manuscripts of Harlem Renaissance notables, and eventually helped Van Vechten donate the material that was the basis for the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. She was a sponsor of the short-lived but influential periodical Fire!!, and was also reputed to be "the one Afro-American woman [Jean] Toomer [who soon after married a white woman] was once thought to care about." (Berry, p.214). The inscription in this book would indicate that Ewing was apparently familiar with the literary party scene that Peterson was at the center of. Not surprisingly, Ewing's papers also went to Yale, whether through Peterson intercession is not known to us.

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