Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in 1891 in Chicago to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. Her father died or disappeared when she was young, and her mother remarried a white Danish man, leaving Larsen in the painful position of being the only dark-skinned member of her family. She attended Fisk University, studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital in New York, and worked as a nurse and then a librarian in Harlem before turning to fiction. Her two novels, Quicksand and Passing, published in 1928 and 1929 respectively, established her as a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and she became the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Passing.