The Merry-Go-Round is a collection of essays by Carl Van Vechten, the American critic, novelist, and tastemaker who championed modern music and the arts in the early twentieth century. Ranging over opera, popular song, theatre, cats, and the passing enthusiasms of cultivated life, the pieces display his wit, erudition, and appetite for the new.
Van Vechten writes as a sophisticated cosmopolitan, equally at home discussing serious music and the pleasures of the modern city, and his essays sparkle with allusion and personality. An early advocate of figures who would shape twentieth-century culture, he brought a connoisseur’s enthusiasm to whatever caught his fancy. For readers who enjoy stylish, opinionated cultural criticism from the 1910s, this collection offers an entertaining whirl through the tastes and amusements of a lively, discerning mind.