"Hunter Stagg's party was delightful! He said you wouldn't really call it a party in Richmond but whatever it was, we had a good time, -- and just as at "150" the cocktail shaker was never empty. There were eight of us there, -- a girl and her brother, four young men, and Hunter and myself. Hunter made a new kind of cocktail of which no one knew the name, so it was christened then and there as the "Hard Daddy" after one of my Blues."

Hughes went on to write that "Hunter is a beautiful and entertaining person who ought to draw a salary for just being alive. But I don't believe he asked a single Southerner to his party, -- not a soul refused to shake hands with me and we all had too good a time! And nobody choked in the traditional Southern manner when the anchovies and crackers went round because they were eating with a Negro. And after three "Hard Daddys" all the glasses got mixed up."

Stagg would go on to write favorably of Hughes' second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, in his literary column, "Galley Sheets in the Wind" March 21, 1927 that ran shortly after he began work as the literary editor of the Richmond News Leader. The comments read in part, "Reading this new volume, we conclude that if it is to be called a little less fiery than its predecessor, it is at the same time a good deal more considered, more thoughtful - in short, it is better art." He also wrote that Hughes' work should be recognized "as the authentic artistic expression of something in human nature, we are not quite prepared to say what, only that we are sure it is something very real."

Carl Van Vechten's connection to Richmond was not limited to his correspondence with local literary notables. He had also had become attached to the literary magazine, The Reviewer, shortly after it began publication in Richmond. Stagg served as one of the magazine's four editors.

"... by the end of that six months the magazine had attracted favorable attention outside of the state," wrote Elizabeth Scott in the Virginia Cavalcade, Winter, 1978. "Joseph Hergesheimer and Carl Van Vechten had joined its boosters. Both writers were enormously popular at the time, and their names were like magnets, drawing others to the publication." [from "In Fame, not specie": The Reviewer, Richmond's Oasis in "The Sahara of the Bozart" by Elizabeth S. Scott, Virginia Cavalcade, vol. 27, no. 3, Winter, 1978.]

Van Vechten visited Richmond a number of times including at least two trips with writer Gertrude Stein. In the early 1960s, Margaret Freeman Cabell, James Branch Cabell's second wife, persuaded Van Vechten to write the introduction to a collection of Cabell's Letters. Van Vechten wrote:

"I recall an old definition of a literary clique: ten or a dozen authors who live in the same town and who hate each other cordially. This was not true of our group in the Twenties. Many of us did not live in New York, but we at least attempted to love one another. We frequently dined together, wrote each other sporadically or often, according to the interest involved, and sometimes reviewed each other's books. Occasionally we visited together in our respective towns. Actually, it was the nearest approximation to a group that had existed since Hawthorne's day, and certainly there is nothing like it today when occasionally you see a single author struggling with his peers at a cocktail party." [from Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others, edited by Padraic Colum and Margaret Freeman Cabell, published by Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.]