Meet the Author
Nella Larsen
American · 1891–1964 · Novelist and nurse
Portrait: Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A Harlem Renaissance novelist whose two short novels examine women caught between racial worlds.
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Why read Nella Larsen?
Larsen wrote about the color line from the inside, through women who can cross it and pay for doing so. Quicksand and Passing are brief, tense, and full of things left unsaid. Read her for a view of the Harlem Renaissance that is sharp about class, marriage, and the price of safety.
A life in six dates
- 1891Born in Chicago
- 1915Completes nurse training in New York
- 1928Publishes her first novel, Quicksand
- 1929Publishes Passing
- 1930Becomes the first African American woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing
- 1964Dies in New York City
Themes across the work
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
The Harlem RenaissanceLarsen belonged to the 1920s flowering of Black literature, art, and music centered in Harlem.
PassingLight-skinned Black Americans who lived as white were a real and much-discussed part of life under segregation.
RediscoveryAfter decades of neglect, her novels were taken up again by readers and scholars in the late twentieth century.