Van Vechten's manifesto

The point is that I have determined to be a writer, not a journalist or a scribbler but a writer.  This does not as a rule make money; it usually takes it.  The kind of writing I do requires time for reflection, it requires going about and meeting a great many people, it requires travel, and buying books and other expenses...If I were younger I might be able to work on a newspaper and write books too.  But I am just beginning to get over the bad effects of newspaper work, i.e. the hurry produced by the demand for copy makes one fall into routine expressions which eventually spoil a style.  My stocks serve to pay rent and that is about all.    - Carl Van Vechten, NY Times music critic, writing his brother in 1919. 

Seven years later, the bastard inherited a million dollars (!) 

Comments

[Brian]

I wonder if he was back at the Times a couple of years later after the stock market crash?

[Bryant]

haha.

Van Vechten's a Cedar Rapids boy who said he "loathed living there from the first." Like John Wayne, a little part of me dies when I read our homegrowns renounce the place.