Larsen, Nella (1891–1964)

Award-winning novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, whose fiction exploring themes of gender, race, class, and sexuality heralded the later work of African-American women writers. Name variations: Nellie Larson; Nella Imes; Nellie Walker; (pseudonym) Allen Semi. Pronunciation: LAHR-suhn. Born Nellie Walker on April 13, 1891 (not 1893 as she later claimed) in Chicago, Illinois; died in her Manhattan apartment a few days before her body was found on March 30, 1964; daughter of Peter Walker, a cook and laborer, or Peter Larson or Larsen, a railway conductor (the two men might be one and the same), and Mary Hanson Walker Larson or Larsen (a seamstress); attended six years of public schooling; attended Fisk University, one academic year, 1907–08; Lincoln Hospital and Home Training School for Nurses, New York, diploma, 1915; Library School of the New York Public Library, certificate, 1923; married Elmer Samuel Imes, on May 3, 1919 (divorced 1933); no children.

Had two short pieces published in the Brownies' Book (1920); worked as a library assistant, New York Public Library 135th Street Branch (1922); was a librarian at the 135th Street Branch (1923–26); published first two short stories (1926); published first novel, Quicksand (1928); published second novel, Passing (1929); awarded bronze medal, Harmon Foundation (1929); was first African-American woman recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing (1930); traveled through Spain and France (1930–31); worked as a nurse, Gouverneur Hospital (1944–61); worked as a nurse, Metropolitan Hospital (1961–64).

Publications:

"Playtime: Three Scandinavian Games" and "Playtime: Danish Fun," in Brownies' Book (Vol. 1, June 1920, pp. 191–192, 219); review of Certain People of Importance by Kathleen Norris, in Messenger (May 1923, p. 713); (under pseudonym Allen Semi) "The Wrong Man" in Young's Realistic Stories Magazine (January 1926, pp. 243–246); (under pseudonym Allen Semi) "Freedom," in Young's Realistic Stories Magazine (April 1926, pp. 241–243); "Correspondence," in Opportunity (September 1926, p. 295); Quicksand (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928); review of Black Sadie by T. Bowyer Campbell, in Opportunity (January 1929, p. 24); Passing (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929); "Moving Mosaic or N.A.A.C.P. Dance, 1929," excerpt from Quicksand, in All-Star Benefit Concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Forrest Theater, New York, program booklet (December 8, 1929); "Sanctuary," in Forum (January 1930, pp. 15–18); "The Author's Explanation," in Forum (Supplement 4, April 1930, pp. xli–xlii).

By 1920, the formerly white area of Harlem, occupying less than two square miles in New York City, had become home to about 200,000 black people. With the heroic service of African-Americans during the recently ended World War I still fresh on their minds, Harlem's residents vowed to continue the fight for democratic rights on their own behalf. One of the weapons would be the quantity and quality of creative work that marked the era of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement. As Alain Locke put it in the introduction to his anthology of works by Harlem Renaissance writers published in 1925, "The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem." One of the major novelists associated with that quickening pulse was Nella Larsen, whose difficult youth and obscure old age did not lessen the impact of her creative work, both at the time of its publication and decades later.

The facts of Larsen's birth and childhood are sketchy, in part because as an adult she tended to invent, rather than report, her personal history, as her biographer Thadious Davis has shown. Her mother Mary Hanson was a white seamstress of Danish birth, and her father appears to have been a black West Indian immigrant named Peter Walker who worked in Chicago, Illinois, as a cook and laborer. The couple applied for a marriage license in Chicago in 1890, but there is no record that they married then. Their daughter Nellie Walker was born on April 13, 1891. Although Nella later wrote that her father died when she was two years old and that her mother then married a white man, Davis has speculated convincingly that Peter Walker changed his name to Peter Larson and then Larsen and began passing as white in order to take a better-paying whites-only job as a railway conductor. During the transition, however, the obviously non-white daughter Nellie could not stay in the household, and records indicate that a child named Nellie Larson lived in one of Chicago's institutions for unwed mothers and their children in 1900. From 1901 until 1907, Nellie Larson lived with the Peter Larson/Larsen family and attended elementary school and junior high before leaving Chicago to enroll in high school courses at Fisk University in Nashville, where she began using the name Nella Larsen.

Nella stayed at Fisk only one academic year, leaving in 1908 when familial support apparently ceased. The deterioration of family connections must have contributed to a feeling of exile to the margins, an uncomfortable but nevertheless valuable vantage point from which the future writer could "catch that flying glimpse of the panorama," as Nella called the hopes and activities of her generation. Very little is known of her life from 1908 until 1912, though she later claimed to have spent time with her mother's relatives in Copenhagen while a teenager. In 1912, she enrolled in the Lincoln Hospital and Home Training School for Nurses in New York City, where a student could work in exchange for vocational education. The program provided training for African-American women to become nurses, but only whites filled the administrative and physician positions. Despite the racial discrimination, Larsen was surrounded by a number of influential and dedicated African-American women, including Adah Thoms , who helped transform nursing into a profession, and Larsen also began to meet prominent New Yorkers who would help usher in the Harlem Renaissance era.

Upon graduation in 1915, she stayed at Lincoln Hospital as a supervisor for several months before accepting a position in Alabama as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute's John Andrew Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School. Finding the job of supervising the hospital's nurses and running a training program with insufficient funds frustrating, and the paternalistic atmosphere on campus restrictive, she returned to a supervisory position at Lincoln after only one year in the South. Two years later, she became one of the elite of African-American nurses employed by the New York Department of Health. While working with a nurses' organization supporting relief efforts during World War I, she met physicist Elmer Samuel Imes, son of an

influential African-American family. With her marriage to Imes on May 3, 1919, Nella began to move in an interracial social circle of well-connected, highly educated professionals.

Discontented with her public-health work and feeling encouraged by the publication of two short pieces in the Brownies' Book, an African-American children's magazine edited by the highly educated Jessie Redmon Fauset (later considered a "midwife" of the Harlem Renaissance for her role in identifying and ushering into print new young writers), Larsen resigned from the Health Department. She began volunteering at the New York Public Library's 135th Street Branch in Harlem, where she soon landed a paid position as an assistant in the children's department. In the fall of 1922, she took a leave of absence to become the first African-American admitted to the library's training program, earning the certificate that led to an upgraded position and salary when she returned to full-time work at the 135th Street Branch in 1923. Her career move proved to be fortuitous, for the library served as a cultural center during the Harlem Renaissance, the period in the 1920s when an outpouring of African-American literature and arts gained notice and respect from both blacks and whites. In the library's assembly room, black writers gave readings from their work; in the library's little theater, black playwrights, directors, and actors produced live performances; and on the library's walls, black artists displayed their creations. Larsen met whites and blacks interested in the creative products of African-Americans, and she responded to the existence of an enthusiastic market by beginning to write fiction. Young's Realistic Stories Magazine published two of her short stories in 1926, shortly after she left her library job to concentrate on writing.

For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well.

—Nella Larsen, Passing

Alfred and Blanche Knopf published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928, and her second, Passing, a year later. Both books explore the tensions inherent in the lives of middle-class black women who desire freedom from society's racial and gender limits. At a time when most African-American women worked as low-paid agricultural laborers or domestics, with few educational opportunities and little if any access to birth control, a small minority of educated, middle-class black women founded clubs, schools, settlement houses, and other institutions designed to help uplift the race in general and their sisters in particular. Although their efforts accomplished much, they failed, at least during Larsen's lifetime, to break down all of the barriers to black women's full, autonomous participation in American society and culture. Those failures, evident in Larsen's lived experiences, fueled her creative imagination.

Critics have seen autobiographical elements in both of Larsen's books, particularly in reflections of her ambivalence about her own racially mixed heritage and women's expected behavior as wives and mothers. In Quicksand, for instance, the mixed-race female protagonist Helga Crane leaves her teaching position on the stultifying campus of a Southern black college to spend time with relatives in Copenhagen, where she is regarded as intriguing and exotic, but ends up back in the United States submerged in an oppressive marriage. In Passing, Larsen exposes the lies perpetrated by men and women of color who live in a racist, sexist, class-conscious, and homophobic society, perhaps similar to the kinds of deceptions the novelist herself seems to have practiced to obfuscate her humble and painful origins. Literary critic Deborah McDowell also has explicated the themes of black women's sexuality present in both novels. At a time when black women organized to counter the popular image of themselves as sexual savages—the legacy of the historical sexual exploitation of black women under slavery—Larsen broke new ground by attempting to represent black women's sexual desires in a realistic, though circumspect, way. In her sophisticated handling of society's white-black, male-female, lesbian-straight, urban-rural, North-South, elite-humble, married-single, creative-conventional, control-chaos dualities and her ambiguous endings, Larsen demonstrated a modernist sensibility, a need to shatter old patterns without necessarily constructing new ones to replace them.

Well-known critics such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke noticed and praised Larsen's novels; friends such as the white writer and socialite Carl Van Vechten and the African-American writer and NAACP activist Walter White served as advocates for her work. In 1929, she received the Harmon Foundation's Bronze Award for Distinguished Achievement among Negroes in Literature, largely for her literary style and her willingness to tackle difficult topics in Quicksand. A year later, she became the first African-American woman to receive a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, intended to underwrite a year's stay in Europe to research her planned third novel. Shortly before she left for Europe, however, Larsen's short story "Sanctuary" appeared in the Forum magazine, followed by charges that she stole the idea and format of the story from another author whose work had appeared eight years earlier. Larsen denied having plagiarized, but the incident harmed her reputation and her self-image. Though she began work on two or three additional novels and submitted a completed novel to her publisher, no more of her fiction appeared in print.

When she returned from Europe in 1932, she briefly joined her husband in Nashville where he was on the Fisk University faculty. Aware that Elmer was romantically involved with a white woman, Larsen divorced him in 1933. Having been rejected as a mixed-race daughter by parents who apparently chose to identify themselves as a white couple, she responded to Elmer's rejection and to the setbacks in her writing career in part by beginning to remove herself from the social and professional circle that had produced and supported the Harlem Renaissance. Although Larsen returned to New York after her divorce, she tended to avoid Harlem, which had suffered visibly as a result of economic hard times, and by 1937 she had cut herself off from all contact with literary friends. A kind of exile had been thrust upon her, first by her birth family and then by her husband, but in her mature years she fashioned her own exile, living somewhat reclusively in a small apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Larsen's alimony settlement sustained her throughout the Depression. But with Elmer's death in 1941, her livelihood ceased, and, identifying herself as the widow Mrs. Imes, she did some private duty nursing. In 1944, she went to work as a registered nurse at Gouverneur Hospital in New York where she eventually became night supervisor. Seventeen years later, at age 70, she joined the staff at Metropolitan Hospital where she worked until her death of heart failure in 1964. Because she lived the last years of her life apart from them, friends and acquaintances from the Harlem Renaissance era failed to note her demise, but hospital co-workers expressed sadness at the loss of a colleague whom they considered an excellent and caring nurse.

Larsen's life exemplified the triumphs and tragedies of a talented, intelligent woman of color driven to reach for—and accomplish—more than her upbringing promised. She invented a life of creative ambition that produced two enduring novels evocative of the limits she herself faced and fought. Ultimately thwarted by her own inner conflicts as well as by external circumstances, at mid-life Larsen reinvented herself, trading creative ambition for compassionate acceptance.

sources:

Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

McDowell, Deborah E., ed. "Introduction" in Quicksand and Passing, by Nella Larsen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986, pp. ix–xxxv.

Washington, Mary Helen. "Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance," in Ms. Vol IX, no. 6. December 1980, pp. 44–50.

suggested reading:

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. NY: Knopf, 1981.

collections:

Letters between Nella Larsen and Carl Van Vechten and between Larsen and Dorothy Peterson are in the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Cheryl Knott Malone , lecturer, reference librarian, and bibliographer, Austin, Texas