On This Day In TCXPI History - We Must Never Forget! Nallallitea “Nella” Larsen, Nurse, Novelist, and Short Story Writer. Nella Larsen was born April 13, 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. As a child, she lived for several years with her mother’s relatives in Denmark and in 1907 briefly attended Fisk University. In 1915, Larsen graduated from the all-black nursing school at Lincoln Hospital and went to work at the Tuskegee Institute where she became head nurse at a hospital and training school. She moved to New York City in 1916 and began to publish her first short stories in 1920. In 1928, Larsen published “Quicksand,” an autobiographical novel that received critical acclaim, and in 1929 she published “Passing,” which also garnered critical acclaim. After traveling Europe for several years on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Larsen returned to New York in 1933 and resumed her nursing career. Biographies of Larsen include “Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled” (1996) and “In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line” (2006). The daughter of a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father, novelist Nella Larsen explores the complex issues of racial identity and identification in her fiction. Though critics remain conflicted about her novels, Quicksand(1928) and Passing (1929), there can be no question that they are significant, groundbreaking American literary texts. Larsen received a number of awards for her writing; in 1930, she was the First African American Woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Along with her contemporary, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, Larsen is considered to be one of the most important female voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Source: thewright.org/explore/blog/entry/today-in-black-history-3302012 brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/cvvpw/gallery/larsen.html
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 13:12:38 +0000
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