Excavations: A Book of Advocacies was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, and it collects Van Vechten’s critical essays — pieces written for magazines and newspapers over the preceding decade, each one arguing for the importance of a writer, composer, or artist that the mainstream had overlooked.
Van Vechten’s critical instincts were remarkably prescient. He championed Herman Melville at a time when Melville was considered a forgotten minor writer; he wrote about Erik Satie when Satie was dismissed as an eccentric; he promoted Ronald Firbank when Firbank was unknown outside a tiny circle. His essays on these figures are not merely appreciative but analytical — he identifies what makes each one distinctive and explains, with considerable persuasive power, why that distinctiveness matters.
The book is also a portrait of Van Vechten’s aesthetic sensibility: he valued wit over earnestness, style over substance (or rather, he believed style was substance), and individuality over conformity. The writers and artists he championed shared these values, and the book reads as an implicit manifesto for a particular approach to culture — one that prefers the marginal, the eccentric, and the refined to the popular, the conventional, and the earnest.
Collecting Excavations
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1926): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$35