Nella Larsen was an American novelist and short story writer famously associated with the Harlem Renaissance era, which one writer has called "an era of extraordinary acheivement in black American art and literature areas during the 1920's and 1930's.First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels—Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)—and a few short stories.
Background
Ethnicity:
She was a daughter of Marie Hanson, a Danish immigrant, and Peter Walker, a West Indian man of predominantly African descent
She was born in 1891 as Nellie Walker, the daughter of a Danish woman and an West Indian man of color. Her mother later married a white man. As a result, she grew up as the black child of a lower-middle class white household. Her family, perhaps ashamed of her race and anxious to get rid of her or perhaps interested in her education and future, enrolled her in Fisk University, a prestigious African-American school.
As a child, Larsen lived a few years with her mother's relations in Denmark.
She was an extremely educated woman. She attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1909 to 1910. She then continued her education at the university of Copenhagen from 1910 to 1912. She also studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital in New York City from 1912 until 1915. She then began her career as an assistant superintendent of nurses from 1915 to 1916, and became a nurse at Lincoln Hospital in New York City. Larson was diagnosed with a sickness in 1925 which led her a few years later to pursue her career as a writer.
Education
Her family, perhaps ashamed of her race and anxious to get rid of her or perhaps interested in her education and future, enrolled her in Fisk University, a prestigious African-American school.
In 1912, Larsen enrolled in nursing school at New York's Lincoln Hospital. Upon graduating in 1915, she went South to work in Tuskegee, Alabama where she became head nurse at a hospital and training school.
In 1914, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home. Founded in the nineteenth century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve blacks, the hospital elements had grown in importance. The total operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. At the time, the nursing home patients were primarily black; the hospital patients were primarily white; the doctors were male and white; and the nurses and nursing students were female and black. As Pinckney writes, "No matter what situation Larsen found herself in, racial irony of one kind or another invariably wrapped itself around her."
Upon graduating in 1915, Larsen went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she became head nurse at its hospital and training school. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. Added to the poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee, Larsen put up with the situation only until 1916.
Career
Upon graduating in 1915, she went South to work in Tuskegee, Alabama where she became head nurse at a hospital and training school. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it.
In 1916, she returned to New York to work again as a nurse. In 1919, she married Elmer Samuel Imes, a prominent African American physicist. In the year after her marriage, she began to write, publishing her first pieces in 1920. She left nursing in 1921 and, in 1922, took up work as a librarian.
In 1921 Larsen worked nights and weekends as a volunteer with Ernestine Rose, to help prepare for the first exhibit of "Negro art" at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Encouraged by Rose, she became the first black woman to graduate from the NYPL Library School, which was run by Columbia University.
Larsen passed her certification exam in 1923 and spent her first year working at the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, where she had strong support from her white supervisor Alice Keats O'Connor, as she had from Rose. They and another branch supervisor where she worked supported Larsen and helped integrate the staff of the branches. She next transferred to the Harlem branch, as she was interested in the cultural excitement in the neighborhood.
In October 1925, Larsen took a sabbatical from her job for health reasons and began to write her first novel.
She became a writer active in the interracial literary and arts community, where she became friends with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer and writer. In 1928, Larsen published Quicksand, a largely autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.