When Washington Was in Vogue When Washington Was in Vogue When Washington Was in Vogue is a Harlem Renaissance novel written by Edward Christopher Williams, set in Washington, D.C. in 1922-3. The first epistolary novel written by an African-American, it was originally serialized in the radical magazine "The Messenger" between January 1925 and July 1926 as "The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair." Largely due to the small circulation of the magazine, "When Washington Was in Vogue" languished in obscurity until its rediscovery and subsequent publication in 2003. It follows the adventures of Davy Carr, a scholar living amongst the
When Washington Was in Vogue due to its formulaic plotlines, others saw Williams’s analysis of intra-racial social politics as a fascinating window into the period. "Publishers Weekly" heralded it as “an invaluable addition to period scholarship”, while a laudatory review in "The Crisis" said the novel was “a welcome and consistently entertaining glimpse of a pivotal era”. With Christina Moore’s 2013 “Traditional Rebirth: The Epistolary Genre in When Washington Was in Vogue,” published in "African American Review", the novel (as a published whole) received its first scholarly treatment outside of McKible’s own work. When Washington Was in Vogue When Washington Was in Vogue is a