Nella Larsen

From the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author of Passing, a novel of one mixed-race woman's far-reaching quest to discover identity and happiness.   At twenty-three, Helga Crane teaches in 1920s Georgia at one of the country's finest colleges for African Americans, and she's engaged to a fellow teacher. Yet happiness eludes her. And when she can't take the snobbish, conformist atmosphere one second more, she breaks off her relationship with her...

"A light-skinned beauty who spends years passing for white finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem neighborhood. A restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. A mother's confrontation with tragedy tests her loyalty to her race. The gifted Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen wrote compelling dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive,...

Published in 1928, Nella Larsen's first novel "Quicksand" regards the story of Helga Crane, the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father. The character is loosely based on Larsen's own experiences and deals with the character's struggle for racial and sexual identity, a theme common to Larsen's work. In Larsen's second novel, "Passing," published in 1929, the author revisits this struggle through the...

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing is hailed today as a significant literary work of Harlem Renaissance, though for several decades it, like all of her works, was out of print. As history rights a wrong and recommits Larsen's name to memory, it is beneficial to look at the other writings she published over her short career, collected here in Beyond Passing: The Further Writings of Nella Larsen. Contained within are her autobiographical novel Quicksand,...

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery,...