Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
Nella Larsen, 1928
Photographer | James Allen
Source | Wikimedia Commons
License | Public Domain
Nella Larsen is a groundbreaking figure in American history. Trained professionally as both a nurse and a librarian, Larsen is the first African-American to receive a degree from a school of library science in the United States and the first African-American woman to receive a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also the first African-American author to publish a short story—”Sanctuary,” included here—in the esteemed literary magazine, The Forum. In the two novels and single short story she published over the course of her brief writing career, Larsen drew upon her personal history of living as a woman on both sides of the color line to explore nothing less than the experience of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the early twentieth century. Larsen was born in Chicago to a Danish immigrant mother and a Caribbean father. Leaving Chicago during her teens, Larsen enrolled in the racially segregated high school associated with Fisk University and then worked as head nurse of the Tuskeegee Institute’s School of Nursing. However, she chafed at what she saw as the limited mission and puritanical culture of these black institutions, even criticizing them in her loosely autobiographical novel, Quicksand (1928).
Moving to Harlem with her husband in 1920 and taking a job at the New York Public Library on 135th Street, Larsen found a more satisfactory model for black American culture in the historic neighborhood’s music and literary scene. In her first novel, Quicksand, Larsen uses her experiences growing up in a mixed-race home, working in fabled black institutions, and living in Denmark and Harlem to represent the often cruel vagaries of racial identification and class division. In her second novel, Passing (1929), Larsen writes about two light-skinned Afri-immigrant mother and a Caribbean father. Leaving Chicago during her teens, Larsen enrolled in the racially segregated high school associated with Fisk University and then worked as head nurse of the Tuskeegee Institute’s School of Nursing. However, she chafed at what she saw as the limited mission and puritanical culture of these black institutions, even criticizing them in her loosely autobiographical novel, Quicksand (1928).
Moving to Harlem with her husband in 1920 and taking a job at the New York Public Library on 135th Street, Larsen found a more satisfactory model for black American culture in the historic neighborhood’s music and literary scene. In her first novel, Quicksand, Larsen uses her experiences growing up in a mixed-race home, working in fabled black institutions, and living in Denmark and Harlem to represent the often cruel vagaries of racial identification and class division. In her second novel, Passing (1929), Larsen writes about two light-skinned African-American childhood friends, one of whom grows up to hide her race, pass as a white woman, and marr