Larsen, Nella (1891-1964), was an African American writer of fiction. Her autobiographical novel Quicksand (1928) is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement stressing greater freedom of expression in African American literature and other arts during the 1920’s and early 1930’s.
The central character in Quicksand is a restless and intelligent young woman named Helga Crane. Like Larsen, the character of Helga had a West Indian father and a white Danish mother. The novel is a psychological portrait of Helga, who lives a discontented life. Rejecting her European heritage, she marries a Southern Black preacher but remains unfulfilled and isolated at the end of her story.
Larsen wrote one other novel, Passing (1929), which, like Quicksand, deals with challenges facing mixed-race African American women. In Passing, Clare Kendry, an attractive, light-skinned Black woman, manages to escape poverty by passing as a white woman. However, her ambiguous death at the end of the novel may be a death by suicide, suggesting how unhappy she had been with living in the white world. A motion picture adaptation of the novel premiered in 2021.
Larsen was born Nellie Walker on April 13, 1891, in Chicago. Her father was Peter Walker, a cook from the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands). Her mother was Mary Hansen, a Danish immigrant. Nella’s father either died or left his family when she was a child. Her mother then married a white Danish immigrant named Peter Larsen.
Larsen enjoyed literary success for only a few years after her novels were published. After 1933, she worked as a nurse in New York City, where she died on March 30, 1964.
See also Harlem Renaissance.
