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Nella Larsen never
revealed much about her life. Thadious M. Davis comments that "Implicit
in her reticence about her background is some discomfort in being the
only black member of her immediate family" (183). Her parents were
Peter Walker and Mary Hanson Walker. Her mother was Danish and her father
was "apparently" West Indian. She was born in Chicago, Illinois
on April 13, 1891. Her father died when she was two years old. Her mother
then married Peter Larsen, "a man of her own race and nationality"
(T Davis 182), shortly afterwards. They had a daughter, Larsen's half-sister.
According to Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Larsen's stepfather "viewed
her as an embarrassment" (696). Her education was at a private school
in Chicago which she attended with her half-sister. "A lonely child,"
Larsen was "an avid reader of novels and travelogues and a keen observer
of life around her" (T Davis 1577). She was a sensitive person who
chose not see her family very often because "it might make it awkward
for them, particularly my half-sister" (T. Davis 183).
From 1909-10 Larsen studied science at Fisk University in Nashville. She
then moved to Copenhagen from 1910-12 and audited classes at the University
of Copenhagen. Larsen studied nursing from 1912-15 at Lincoln Hospital
in New York City. She then spent two years as assistant superintendent
of nurses at Tuskegee Institute. The next three years, from 1916-18, she
worked as a nurse at her alma mater, Lincoln Hospital. It was while she
was working as a Department of Health nurse for New York City from 1918-21
that she was first published in The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine
edited by Jessie Redmon Fauset. She also married physicist Elmer S. Imes
on May 3, 1919.
Her love of books led her to take a job as librarian in the Harlem Branch
of the New York Public Library, first as assistant librarian from 1922-23
and then as children's librarian from 1924-26. Some of her favorite authors
were James Joyce, John Galsworthy, Walter White, and Carl Van Vechten.
Her short story "Correspondence" was published in September
of 1926, the same month she quit her job at the library. "As a socialite
wife" (Brown-Guillory 696) Larsen fell in with the major Black authors
of the Harlem Renaissance including James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset,
Jean Toomer, and
Langston Hughes. Walter White and Van Vechten were instrumental
in securing a contract [for Larsen]. . . from Alfred A. Knopf" (Brown-Guillory
696).
Larsen's first novel Quicksand "which is largely autobiographical"
(Peters 278), was published in 1928 and won a Bronze medal from the Harmon
Foundation that same year. Her second novel, Passing, followed in 1929.
She was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim fellowship for creative
writing, which she received in 1930, the same year that she was accused
of plagiarism. It seems her short story "Sanctuary," published
in Forum magazine, bore a close resemblance to another story published
in 1922. She was able to prove her innocence, but was not published again
during her lifetime. Marital problems during this same time led to her
"crudely sensationalized 1933 divorce" (Peters 279). The Afro-American
press reported rumors that Imes was "having an affair with a white
woman and that Larsen tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window"
(Brown-Guillory 697).
Larsen, a very private person, was crushed by both the accusation of plagiarism
and by the negative publicity during her divorce. She gradually drew away
from her literary friends and worked as a nurse in Manhattan from 1941
until her death. Nella Larsen was found dead in her apartment at age 72
in March of 1964.
Achievements:
" . . . on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America
has produced since the heyday of [Charles] Chestnutt" - W.E.B. DuBois
"Quicksand, then represents a new departure in the novels of Black
women. It is written from within, transcending the formulaic novels before
it. It also reflects the 'double consciousness' that DuBois spoke about."
- Marianna W. Davis
"Novelist and short story writer Nella Larsen created images of Black
women that dispelled the myth of the typical and simplistically caricatured
tragic mulatto of American literature . . . . Literary critics and authors
who were acquaintances of Larsen praised her for adeptly portraying the
life of bourgeois African-Americans of mixed ancestry, a class for which
a paucity of literature is extant." - Elizabeth Brown-Guillory
Nella Larsen has earned a reputation as an important Afro-American novelist
on the basis of two books, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Both novels
show a skillful handling of narrative and symbolism, as well as a complexity
of vision, that place them among the best fiction produced by New Negro
authors in the 1920's." - Thadious M. Davis
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