Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen was born in Chicago to a Danish immigrant mother and a father of Afro-Caribbean descent, and grew up navigating a complicated racial identity within her own mixed-race family, an experience that would deeply inform her later fiction. She trained as a nurse and later became a librarian at the New York Public Library, working in Harlem during the height of its cultural renaissance.

Larsen published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928, a psychologically nuanced story following a mixed-race woman's search for belonging across the United States and Denmark, drawing heavily on Larsen's own biography. The novel won critical acclaim and the bronze medal for literature from the NAACP's Harmon Foundation. Her second novel, Passing, published in 1929, examined the fraught relationship between two childhood friends, one of whom lives her adult life passing as white, and remains one of the most studied literary explorations of racial identity in American fiction.

Larsen became the first African American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in 1930, and used the award to travel and work on a third novel that was never published. Following a personal and professional crisis in the early 1930s, including a plagiarism accusation later shown to be unfounded and the end of her marriage, Larsen withdrew from the literary world entirely, returning to nursing and living in relative obscurity until her death in 1964. Her two novels were largely forgotten for decades before being rediscovered and reassessed by scholars from the 1970s onward as major achievements of Harlem Renaissance literature.