Born Nella Marie Larsen on April 13, 1891 or 1893, Nella Larsen grew up in a diverse environment in east Chicago, which had a profound impact on her life and later works. Many biographical details of her life remain unknown or are contradictory. Her father, Peter Walker, was a Black cook from the West Indies, and her mother, Mary Hanson, was a Danish seamstress. Her father died when she was two years old and and her mother remarried a White Danish man, Peter Larson. Larsen’s mother and stepfather had another daughter together, Anna. When her mother remarried Nella became alienated from her all-White family. Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled Nellye Larson and Nellie Larsen, before settling finally on Nella Larsen. The mixed family moved to west Chicago to a mostly White neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants, but encountered discrimination because of Nella.
By all appearances, the family was White. But Nella Larsen was different, something that would come to inspire her fiction - celebrated during the Harlem Renaissance, that period of time of outpouring African-American literature, music and arts. As a child, Larsen experienced struggles as the lone mixed-race member of the household. At the same time as the migration of Southern Blacks increased to the city, so had European immigration. Racial segregation and tensions had increased in the immigrant neighborhoods, where both groups competed for jobs and housing. Growing up as the only Black child in a White family had a profound effect on Larsen and was seen as the primary cause of her later estrangement from her family. From 1895 to 1898, Larsen lived in Denmark with her mother and her half-sister. While she was unusual in Denmark because of being of mixed race, she had some good memories from that time.
After returning to Chicago in 1898, Larsen attended public schools until 1907. At age sixteen, 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 high school courses at Fisk University’s Normal School, a teacher-training program affiliated in Nashville, TN. Here she was fully immersed in an African American environment, surrounded by faces that were not White. Interested in her heritage, Larsen traveled on her own to Denmark after completing a year at Fisk. She lived there for a total of three years between 1909 and 1912 with relatives and studying at the University of Copenhagen. After returning to the United States, she continued to struggle to find a place where she could belong.
In 1912, Larsen enrolled in a three-year program at the Lincoln Hospital Training School for Nurses in New York City, where a student could work in exchange for vocational education. The program provided training for African-American women to become nurses, but only Whites filled the administrative and physician positions. Despite the racial discrimination, Larsen was surrounded by a number of influential and dedicated African-American women, including Adah Thoms, who helped transform nursing into a profession, and Larsen also began to meet prominent New Yorkers who would help usher in the Harlem Renaissance era. She graduated with the equivalent of a registered nurse’s degree in 1915, she stayed at Lincoln Hospital as a supervisor of nurses for several months.
Larsen then went South to work as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute's John Andrew Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School in Tuskegee, Alabama. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. Washington died shortly after Larsen's arrival in Tuskegee. In 1916, she returned to New York to work again supervising nurses at Lincoln Hospital. Two years later, she became one of the elite of Black nurses employed by the New York Department of Health. She worked for them when the Spanish flu pandemic struck the city in 1918. While working supporting relief efforts during World War I, she met physicist Elmer Samuel Imes, a prominent African American physicist, who later chaired the Physics Department at Fisk University, and became the second Black person to earn a PhD in physics. After the war ended, the couple were married on May 3, 1919.
Both Imes and Larsen had overlapping interests in various scholarly, literary, and political subjects. Thus, as members of the “Negro elite,” they had ready access to and associated with many other members of the Harlem Renaissance movement such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Nella began to move in an interracial social circle of well-connected, highly educated professionals. In this milieu, Larsen began to become interested in literature. In the year after her marriage, she began to write, publishing her first pieces in 1920. She left nursing in 1921 and began volunteering helping to prepare the New York Public Library’s first exhibition of African-American artists at the New York Public Library's 135th Street Branch in Harlem. She soon landed a paid position as an assistant in the children's department, while attending school at Columbia University and perfecting her writing.
Soon after earned a library science certification from New York Public Library / Columbia University in 1923, becoming the first African American female graduate of a library program in the United States. Larsen’s love of books commanded her life from 1922 to 1926 when she moved on to work in the Lower East Side and Harlem's 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Her career move proved to be fortuitous, for the library served as a cultural center during the Harlem Renaissance. In the library's assembly room, Black writers gave readings from their work, and in the library's little theater, Black playwrights, directors, and actors produced live performances. Larsen took a sabbatical from her job for health reasons and began to write her first novel in October 1925,
In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Harlem Renaissance, she responded to the existence of an enthusiastic market by beginning to write fiction. Young's Realistic Stories Magazine published two of her short stories and Larsen gave up her work as a librarian and began to work as a writer active in the literary community. Larsen published several articles in the magazine, "The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children Under the Sun", a publication for Black children edited by Jessie Redmon Fauset. She published short fiction under the pseudonym "Allen Semi" (an anagram of her married name, Nella Imes) in 1926. She became a writer active in Harlem's interracial literary and arts community, where she became friends with Carl Van Vechten, a White photographer and writer. In 1927, she began working on her first novel, "Quicksand", a largely semi-autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim.
Many literary critics believe that her creativity and imagination was fueled by her own racial dilemma. Du Bois hailed the book as one of the best that had been written since the works of Charles B. Chesnutt. The book’s theme touched on the racial complexities and the marginalized African American women. The novel follows Helga Crane, a teacher at Naxos, a Black boarding school in the South where excellence is measured by its proximity to Whiteness. Helga, whose mixed-race background mirrors Larsen’s, is unsettled by Naxos’s rigid and racially fraught standards. She seeks love, acceptance, and a sense of purpose, only to be mired in an emotional morass of her own creation. So she leaves in search of financial stability and her own identity. When she connects with her mother’s White relatives, they treat her with a mix of contempt (in Chicago, her remarried uncle, now remarried to a bigoted woman, rejects her) and fascination (her aunt, in Copenhagen, parades her around the predominantly White city as an attractive racial exotic).
"Quicksand" won Larsen the bronze medal from the Harmon Foundation, an organization formed to recognize African-American art and literature, largely for her literary style and her willingness to tackle difficult topics in Quicksand. In 1928, she published "Passing", her second novel, which centers on two mixed-race, light-skinned women, one of whom, Irene, marries a Black man and lives in Harlem, while the other, Clare, marries a White man but cannot reject her Black cultural ties. Clare, Irene discovers, has been living as a white woman married to a racist who is none the wiser about his wife’s background. The relationship between the two women flirts with the sensual as each becomes obsessed with the other’s chosen path. After meeting Clare's husband, Irene does not want anything more to do with Clare but still keeps in touch with her. Larsen delves into the difficulties of passing for white that one woman faces and the problem another one has who doesn’t choose to pass. They are haunted, on the one hand by a deception and on the other hand by remaining true to one’s race.
An important topic Larsen is dealing with is race-identity by not by representing the lower-class problem, but more by focusing on the life and problems of middle-class females. Nella Larsen exposes the lies perpetrated by men and women of color who live in a racist, sexist, class-conscious, and homophobic society. After the publication of this novel, in 1930 Larsen was awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship to an African American woman. She used the grant, worth roughly $2,500 at the time, to pay for a period as an artistic expatriate in Europe. Both books established her in the ranks of the writers of her generation. Well-known critics such as Du Bois and Alain Locke noticed and praised Larsen's novels. Her friends Carl Van Vechten and the African-American writer and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activist Walter White served as advocates for her work.
Working on her third book in Spain, Larsen was distracted by a charge of plagiarism of her short story, “Sanctuary” (1930), that was so similar to a story published in Great Britain by author Sheila Kaye-Smith titled “Mrs. Adis”, first published in the United Kingdom in 1919. Kaye-Smith wrote on rural themes, and was very popular in the U.S. Some critics thought the basic plot of "Sanctuary," and some of the descriptions and dialogue, were virtually identical to Kaye-Smith's work. Larsen claimed that her story was completely her own and had been published in a magazine. No plagiarism charges were proved. Although she was exonerated, the scandal crushed this sensitive and introspective woman and she began to distance herself from Harlem society. The stock market crash of 1929 reduced the financial assistance available to support Black artists. Larsen never completed her third novel, “Sanctuary”.
Upon Larsen’s return, the Fisk administration, concerned about Imes’ behavior, offered to build them a home on campus if Larsen would rejoin her husband. She agreed and moved to Nashville, into a lovely home complete with a cook and maid. However, their marriage could not be saved. Larsen returned to New York, and was forced to confront the realities of her marriage. Imes's scientific studies and achievement placed him in a different class than Larsen. Imes’ work often took him away to Ann Arbor, MI and Montreal and the couple grew estranged. By 1928 Larsen knew that Imes was seeing a White woman named Ethel Gilbert. She and her husband divorced in 1933. They had not lived together for any extended period since 1930. Larsen had no desire to live in the segregated south. She wanted to remain in New York where most of her friends and literary colleagues lived, plus she felt her writing career would prosper.
Although she continued to write, she published no subsequent works thereafter and largely left the Harlem literary scene. By 1934, Nella Larsen had disappeared from Harlem and from the literature-world. Many of her old acquaintances speculated incorrectly that she, like some of her characters, had crossed the color line and disappeared. Supported by alimony, she continued as a fiction writer producing at least one novel and a number of short stories that were not published. Struggling with depression, Larsen stopped writing. After Imes died in 1942, she moved downtown from West 135th Street to Second Avenue and returned to nursing to support herself. A kind of exile had been thrust upon her, first by her birth family and then by her husband.
Larsen attempted to visit White family members several times in her later years, but they refused to acknowledge her. Having cut her ties to Harlem’s circle of artists and intellectuals, and with no connection to her last living relatives, Larsen had, wittingly or not, created the conditions necessary to disappear quietly. She died of a heart attack in her apartment on March 30, 1964. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote was of extraordinary quality, earning her recognition by her contemporaries and by present day critics. Nella Larsen is recognized as one of the most influential, and certainly one of the most enigmatic, writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She had a voracious appetite for books, as well as a newly focused passion for creating her own literature. Because she lived the last years of her life apart from them, friends and acquaintances from the Harlem Renaissance era failed to note her demise, but hospital co-workers expressed sadness at the loss of a colleague whom they considered an excellent and caring nurse.