Nella Larsen: A Career Brief, a Mark Lasting

Much like her predecessor Phillis Wheatley and her contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen's early life and death are shrouded in pathos and tragedy. That Larsen's career assumed a similar trajectory as those women who came before her and alongside her in the literary world should be viewed as a testimony to the sometimes inescapable fate of the woman artist. Before 1970, women writers--particularly African American women writers--faced a formidable challenge when attempting to publish alongside their male contemporaries. While DuBois made the hue and cry of the Harlem Renaissance to make all "art propaganda," and to create for the purpose of racial uplift, gender uplift was lagging behind on the road to literary recognition. 

Nella Larsen. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (featured here). 

Larsen's novellas, Quicksand and Passing were her solitary publications during her long life, but these narratives were significant in their treatment and interrogation of racial construct and the social and moral implications of the process called "passing." Not since Charles Chesnutt's novels of the late 1800s had an African American author taken on such a task. 

Larsen's lasting imprint is reflected in the words of scholars: 

"Of all the fiction published during the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) is arguably the most sophisticated attempt to question the very idea of race: the notion that there are identifiable differences among groups of human beings...Whereas George Schuyler's irreverent science fiction satire Black No More is unrelenting in its sending-up of the American hysteria around race in the period, Larsen's novel is notable for its psychological depth, its investigation of the moral complexity of 'passing'...and its focus on the implications of racial identity for women in particular" (Gates, et al 1079). 

Following her brief literary career, Larsen vacillated between working as a nurse, a marriage to husband, Dr. Elmer S. Imes, and traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship (for which no writing developed). She withdrew almost totally from the public in her final years, and as our text points out, was found dead in her home just a few years before the extent of her literary impact was rediscovered (Gates, et al 1080).