by Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was born in Chicago of biracial parents, a white mother of Danish ancestry and a black father from the West Indies. Throughout her literary career she cultivated a sense of mystery about her past, so that many biographical details are uncertain. But her father seems to have died when she was two. Larsen was raised mostly in her mother’s white middle-class social milieu. At age 16, however, she entered Fisk University’s Normal Preparatory School, a high school in Nashville, Tennessee, associated with the wellknown black university there. She stayed for only a year; scholars speculate that she may have felt uncomfortable in the unfamiliar black world she found at Fisk. Larsen later worked as a nurse and then as a librarian in New York City, giving up her job to write full time starting in 1926. In two years she published two...