Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
Born in Chicago as Nellie Walker in 1891, though she often claimed 1893, novelist Nella Larsen grew up in the midst of rapid urbanization and modernization. Much of her early life is undocumented, though we know that she was raised by her Danish immigrant mother and Danish step-father and had no contact with her father, an African-American man possibly from the West Indies (Davis 5). She attended school as a child in Chicago, and arrived in New York in the 1910s, where she remained for most of her life, estranged from her family. Larsen graduated from Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in 1915, served as superintendent of nurses for two years in Tuskegee, Alabama, and returned to New York to work for the city health department in 1918 (Larson 56). A year later, she married the research physicist Dr. Elmer Samuel Imes and began to move among vibrant social, artistic, and literary circles that would later be characterized as the Harlem Renaissance.
Larsen’s biography is most complete in the years of her literary production and publication, the 1920s. Biographer Thadious M. Davis writes of the class, racial, and gender mobility Larsen was able to access in New York and Harlem in this period: “She smoked in public, wore silk stockings and short dresses, mocked the religious conservatives and racial uplifters, played bridge, and drove a stylish automobile” (10). She worked as a librarian between 1921 and 1926, maintained an active social life of parties, literary events, cabaret, and theatre, and developed friendships with W.E.B. DuBois and his family, the writer-critic Carl Van Vechten, and others associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her first two short stories were published in 1920 in The Brownies’ Book, a magazine for African-American children, and she published two more short stories under the pseudonym Allen Semi (Nella Imes backwards) in Young’s Magazine in 1926. This was also the year she moved with her husband to Harlem. In 1928, Knopf published her first novel Quicksand, which received excellent reviews and the William E. Harmon Bronze Award for Literature (Larson 56-79). Larsen began working at the New York Public Library, and published her second novel Passing in 1929. DuBois wrote that Passing was one of the finest books of the year, “studied and singularly successful art…consummate art” (qtd. in Larson 87). In 1930 she published a third, and final, short story called “Sanctuary” in Forum.
Based on her success at this point, Larsen was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1930 and spent 1930-31 in Europe completing a third novel in Mallorca, Spain before traveling to Paris, Nice, and North Africa (102-105). The years 1930-31 were also a difficult period for Larsen. Her third novel, Mirage, was rejected by Knopf while she was abroad, she was accused of plagiarizing details from another’s story in her own story “Sanctuary,” and her marriage to Imes was deteriorating. Larsen’s husband had not accompanied her to Europe, as he had begun a relationship with another woman, and the couple divorced in 1932. Although Larsen continued to write during the 1930s, including developing at least three novels according to biographer Charles R. Larson (208), she did not publish anything further. Economic depression and shifting literary tastes may have contributed to the barriers to her publication. Of the later period of her life, we know only that she returned to nursing in 1941, was appointed chief nurse at the Gouverneur Hospital in New York City in 1944, and retired from nursing in 1963. She did not maintain contact with her friends from the 1920s in this later period, though did have a few friendships from her work. No obituaries appeared at the time of her death in 1964 (Larson 115-16).
The enigmatic state of much of Larsen’s biography raises questions about our expectations that writers maintain continuities of public appearance and publication. More crucially, the gaps in Larsen’s biography speak to her social position as a racialized woman in early twentieth century America. Many critics and biographers of Larsen note that she continually invented herself throughout her life as she negotiated racial prejudice and marital and career difficulties: as a New Woman, as a New Yorker, as a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and as a woman in the medical profession (Ammons 185). (BH)
Works Cited:
Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994.
Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1993.