Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen was born in a poor neighborhood of Chicago, to a mixed-race father from the Danish West Indies and a white mother from Denmark. Nella’s father deserted the family when Nella was very young, and is believed to have died soon after. Nella’s mother remarried Peter Larsen, another Danish immigrant, and attempted to move to a more prosperous neighborhood of Chicago, but the family was targeted because of Nella’s race and returned to the original neighborhood of her birth. Larsen’s childhood was split between Denmark and the U.S. In the U.S. she attended Fisk College, a historically black university, but did not graduate. Larsen then enrolled in nursing school in New York in 1914, and went on to work in Alabama, and then New York. She married a physician named Elmer Imes, and the pair moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where Larsen began to work as a librarian and pursue writing. She became entrenched in the literary scene in Harlem’s bourgeoning African American culture. Larsen published a number of short stories and two novels in the 1920s. The first of these, Quicksand (1928), was modeled closely on her own life experiences, and received high critical acclaim. In 1933, Larsen and Imes divorced, and Larsen returned to her nursing career before receding from Harlem’s literary circles and moving to the Lower East Side. She died at the age of 72 in her apartment in Brooklyn. Larsen’s mixed-race heritage and life experiences had a profound influence on her novels, which focus on mixed-race characters attempting to figure out their place in the world. Larsen is best known for her novels Quicksand and Passing, which are both semi-autobiographical, and feature raw, emotive explorations of complex race and gender issues. Larsen is touted as the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement, and both of her novels have been taken up in academic settings as canonical explorations of race and gender in early 20th-century American life.