to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as a teacher and nursing supervisor. A year later she resigned this position, apparently rebelling against the stifling atmosphere of this conservative black institution that exploited its nurses and repressed her individuality.

She returned to New York to teach at Lincoln Hospital. Her course in the history of women in nursing would be reflected in the feminist vision that would distinguish her fiction. In 1919 she married Dr. Elmer Imes, a successful black physicist, and moved to Harlem. Her first published writing, in 1920, was a series of children’s games and poems recalled from her early years in Denmark. These pieces appeared in The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP.

Deciding to change her career, Larsen broke precedent as the first black woman to earn her certification in the New York Public Library system. Her experience as a librarian undoubtedly encouraged her to write. In 1924 Larsen was appointed head of the Children’s Room at the 135th Street Library, a center for African American culture, where she made an important contribution to developing the resources of the children’s collection.

That year also marked the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, the vigorous outpouring of literature, art, and music created by African Americans that would continue throughout the 1920’s. In the central chapters of the book Hutchinson examines Larsen’s writing career and her participation in the high-living social life of Harlem during the Jazz Age, with its drinking, night clubbing, and constant party going. For the first time, black and white artists and intellectuals socialized freely together. As the wife of a respected scientist, Larsen was accepted into the black professional class. Carl Van Vechten, an influential supporter of the black writers in Harlem and an important voice in the movement, mentioned her frequently in his diaries. This information, previously overlooked by other biographers, enables Hutchinson to trace Larsen’s activities in those years.

Larsen was a conspicuous figure, dressing in fashionable clothing and smoking cigarettes, and was noted for her wit and sarcasm. The early photographs in the book show a striking woman with a strong sense of style. However, even as she participated in the Harlem high life, her ideas differed sharply from those who found group identity in their blackness. The child of a white family, Larsen had little experience of black culture, nor could she pass as white. This racial ambiguity continued to haunt her and reinforce her sense of alienation. Standing apart as an observer, she was developing the insights that would inform her two novels, which would constitute, Hutchinson says, “one of the most incisive protests against the inhumanity of the color line and its psychic cost ever penned in American literature.”

Larsen’s first published adult short stories appeared in 1926 in popular pulp magazines under the pseudonym “Allen Semi,” a reversal of the letters of her married name Nella Imes. Larsen decided to leave her library position to write full time. Her first novel, Quicksand, was published in 1928 by Knopf, a prominent mainstream publishing house. It was an immediate success, winning the 1929 Harmon Award bronze medal, a prestigious prize for black writers.

Helga Crane, the light-skinned protagonist of Quicksand, is a thinly disguised portrait of Larsen herself in the early part of the narrative. Hutchinson sees the central metaphor as a mythical labyrinth, with Naxos as a piercing satire of the Tuskegee Institute where Larsen had served unhappily as a nurse and teacher. Naxos institutionalizes black racial hypocrisy with the same class consciousness of which white society was guilty. Helga Crane, unable to identify with black culture, travels to Denmark. Early passages include recognizable scenes of Copenhagen, evidence that she had indeed lived there. Treated as an exotic outsider, Helga, like Larsen, experiences racism in a different, but no less destructive, form in Europe.

Helga returns to New York where she suffers an emotional breakdown, undergoes an unlikely religious conversion, and marries a black evangelical minister who takes her south. Here she is suffocated by her life as a wife and mother, constantly pregnant, hopeless, and drowning in a metaphorical quicksand. Readers and critics, while praising the eloquence of the writing, found this denouement unrealistic. Hutchinson dissents, interpreting the conclusion as Larsen’s keen insight into the catastrophe of a gifted woman forced into a traditional role that will destroy her. Contemporary reviewers praised the novel as a breakthrough in exploring black women’s sexuality but missed Larsen’s exposition of the hypocrisy of racial and gender stereotyping.

Larsen’s second novel, Passing, was published in 1929. The title refers to light-skinned African Americans who abandon their heritage and “pass” into white society undetected. The ambiguous relationship between Irene Redfield, a black woman, and Clare Kendry, also black but passing as white, is central to the narrative. Larsen’s insights into passing, with its potentially disastrous consequences of discovery, engendered rumors that Larsen herself had passed, a notion Hutchinson dismisses as unlikely. In the novel’s conclusion, Clare Kendry either falls or is pushed through an open window to her death. Hutchinson interprets this event as murder, with Irene’s jealousy her motive for killing Clare. Clare passes, not to become white, but to acquire material wealth like that of her black acquaintances. Hutchinson notes the author’s sympathy with Clare, saying, Clare’s “brazen border-crossings threaten the boundaries on which Irene’s secure life has been carefully built.” He cites Larsen’s own insecurities and her ambivalence toward race as prevailing themes in this novel.

Larsen, by this time a celebrated figure in the Harlem Renaissance, gave extensive interviews described as charming and self-mocking but frequently dishonest and revealing an unattractive side of her character. A short story, “Sanctuary,” was suspected to have been plagiarized. Although Larsen was exonerated, Hutchinson finds merit in the charge, an irrational choice that might have destroyed her career. Despite this controversy, Larsen won a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Europe working on her next project. This manuscript, Mirage, was rejected by her publisher, as was a later rewrite titled Fall Fever.

Larsen’s marriage had long been in trouble. Dr. Imes was involved with a white woman, an administrator at Fisk University. After returning to New York in 1933, Larsen suffered a mental breakdown. She attempted a reconciliation with Imes, returning to Fisk for a brief time, but it was clear that the marriage was over. She divorced Imes in 1933 on grounds of cruelty and was awarded alimony, money that supported her until the death of Imes.

Although no manuscripts remain, Hutchinson believes that Larsen continued to write, without success. In 1938 she inexplicably broke off all connections with her friends in New York, suffering a period of instability marked by depression and probable alcohol and drug abuse. She disappeared from public notice for several years. Hutchinson believes that when Dr. Imes died in 1942, Larsen forced herself out of her depression and returned to work out of necessity. She rapidly advanced to the position of chief nurse at Gouverneur Hospital in New York City and later earned a top salary as a head nurse at Metropolitan Hospital. Hutchinson learned that her colleagues respected her highly as a professional.

Nella Larsen died in late March, 1964, still officially employed as a nurse although she had not worked in several months. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. She had apparently tried to reconcile with her half sister Anna Larsen Gardner but was turned away. In a final irony, Larsen named Anna, who had claimed untruthfully that she did not know of Larsen’s existence, as her heir.

Historians debate the causes of the end of the Harlem Renaissance but agree that with the onset of the Great Depression, public interest in African American writers waned. Hutchinson attributes much of this decline to novelist Richard Wright, who accused the writers of the 1920’s of selling out to the white world. In the 1960’s the Black Arts and Black Power movements dismissed the Harlem Renaissance writers as irrelevant. Nella Larsen’s fiction, because it did not address “black” social issues, was overlooked.

African American and feminist critics and teachers have since restored Larsen’s fiction to prominence, acknowledging her sophisticated insights into the secret lives of biracial women, neither black not white, unacknowledged by either world.

In this critically acclaimed biography, Hutchinson dispels much of the mystery of Larsen’s life by revealing the fears and insecurities that drove many of her unfortunate choices. Although constrained by the racial politics of her time, she was neither a tragic victim nor a black woman ingratiating herself into white society, as some have claimed. Despite the barriers she faced, she was a successful nurse, librarian, and novelist. The author views Nella Larsen as one of the most important writers of her time, who, living and writing at the margins of society, observed with ironic precision the absurdities of the “color line.”