book about the prosperous black middle-class and persuaded his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to accept it. The novel won praise from reviewers and a Bronze Medal from the Harmon Foundation. With her second novel,Passing (1929), Larsen’s reputation was solidly established. In 1930, after becoming the first black woman creative writer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, she began planning a year of research in Spain and France, which would result in a new novel. The projected work was never completed.

It is uncertain why Larsen’s career as a writer ended so abruptly. A very private person, Larsen was shaken by accusations of plagiarism, made just before her Guggenheim year in Europe, when her short story “Sanctuary” (1930) was said to be similar to an earlier story by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Because they had seen Larsen’s rough drafts, however, her editors had no difficulty establishing her innocence. It is also believed that about that time, Larsen discovered that her husband, by then chairman of the physics department at Fisk, was in love with a younger woman. Nevertheless, it is known that Larsen worked on three different novels during her year abroad and that when she returned, she had one of them almost completed. Larsen was still working on novels as late as 1932 and 1933, while she was living in Nashville in an attempt to revive her marriage. It may have been the notoriety that attended her divorce from Imes in 1933 that drove Larsen into anonymity. It has also been suggested that in the depths of the Great Depression, she felt that there would not be enough income from book sales to make writing worthwhile.

In any case, there were no more novels. Larsen left Harlem and moved to Greenwich Village. Eventually, she began to avoid even the new friends she had made there and deliberately isolated herself. In 1941, after her former husband died and her alimony ceased, Larsen went back to nursing. She died in Manhattan on March 30, 1964, at the age of seventy-two.

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was as mysterious and complicated a woman as the fictional characters she created. She never revealed much about her personal life and even her biographer, Thadious M. Davis, has had to speculate about various periods in her life about which little is known.

Writer and critic T. N. R. Rogers states that one “can probably get a pretty good idea of Nella Larsen’s personality from the depiction of her alter ego, Helga Crane, in Quicksand.” Like Helga, Nella Larsen was the child of a white mother and black father. Larsen’s mother was Danish and her father was probably West Indian. Larsen’s father died when she was young and her mother remarried a white Danish man from whom Nella took the name Larsen. Larsen’s mother and stepfather had another daughter together. Growing up as the only black child in a white family had a profound effect on Larsen, and like her character Helga Crane, she spent a lifetime searching for her identity and never really finding it among blacks or whites.

Larsen was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891. There is conflicting information as to whether she and her white sister attended private or public schools in Chicago. She briefly attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, before moving to Denmark in 1910, where she studied at the University of Copenhagen. In 1914 Larsen returned to the United States and moved to New York City, where she enrolled in nursing school. After a year working as a nurse at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Larsen moved back to New York in 1916, where she met Elmer Imes, a physicist whom she would marry in 1919. After this time, Larsen started to become a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, an African-American intellectual movement that originated out of changes that occurred gradually after the abolition of slavery and lasted into the 1930s. In this milieu, Larsen began to become interested in literature.

At first, Larsen published only a couple of magazine articles. She left nursing in 1921 and soon after began working for the New York Public Library, attending school at Columbia University and perfecting her writing. She published some fiction under the pen name Allen Semi (“Nella Imes” spelled backwards) while working on her first novel, Quicksand, which was published in 1928. The novel was well-received and Larsen won a bronze medal from the Harmon Foundation, an organization formed to recognize African-American art and literature. W. E. B. DuBois called the semi-autobiographical Quicksand “the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt.” Larsen’s next novel, Passing, published in 1929, was also well-received, and in 1930 Larsen became the first African-American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. During that same year, Larsen published a short story titled “Sanctuary” that was so similar to a story published in Great Britain by author Sheila Kaye-Smith titled “Mrs. Adis” that Larsen was accused of plagiarism. Although she was exonerated, the scandal crushed this sensitive and introspective woman and she began to distance herself from Harlem society.

Larsen moved to Europe after 1930 to work on a third novel, which ultimately was rejected by her publisher, Knopf. In 1933, she and Elmer Imes divorced due to his ongoing infidelity and by 1934, Larsen had disappeared entirely from the Harlem literary scene. She continued to live and work as a nurse in New York City, however, until she was found dead in her apartment in March of 1964. She was seventy-two years old.

Although she died in anonymity, Nella Larsen has been acknowledged posthumously as having had a major influence on writers of the Black Arts Movement such as Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. Feminist authors have likewise been influenced by her depictions of female sexuality, considered extremely forward-thinking for the time in which Larsen’s novels were written.

Thadious M. Davis states that Larsen earned her reputation as a major African-American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance based on her two novels, Quicksand and Passing. “Both novels,” Davis says, “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 1920s.” Like the powerful women that populate her novels, however, it appears that Larsen never found her place in life.