Nella Larsen

Novelist

Nella Larsen was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States on April 13th, 1891 and is the Novelist. At the age of 72, Nella Larsen biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.

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Date of Birth
April 13, 1891
Nationality
United States
Place of Birth
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Death Date
Mar 30, 1964 (age 72)
Zodiac Sign
Aries
Profession
Librarian, Novelist, Nurse, Writer
Nella Larsen Height, Weight, Eye Color and Hair Color

At 72 years old, Nella Larsen physical status not available right now. We will update Nella Larsen's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Height
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Weight
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Hair Color
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Eye Color
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Nella Larsen Religion, Education, and Hobbies
Religion
Not Available
Hobbies
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Education
Fisk University, Lincoln Hospital, New York Public Library
Nella Larsen Spouse(s), Children, Affair, Parents, and Family
Spouse(s)
Elmer Imes, ​ ​(m. 1919; div. 1933)​
Children
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Dating / Affair
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Parents
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Nella Larsen Life

Born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891-March 30, 1964), Nellillite "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.

She published two books, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), as a librarian and a librarian, as well as a few short stories.

Despite the fact that her literary output was scant, her contemporaries acknowledged her for her perseverance. Since the late twentieth century, a revival of interest in writing has existed, although problems of racial and sexual identity have been investigated.

Multiple academic journals have praised her work, and she is now widely praised as "not only the best novelist of the Harlem Renaissance but also a key figure in American modernism."

Early life

Nella Larsen was born in the Levee, a poor district of south Chicago, on April 13, 1891. Pederline Marie Hansen, a Danish immigrant who was born 1868 in Brahetrolleborg parish, was a mother of the island of Fyn (Funen). In Chicago, her mother, who went by Mary Larsen (sometimes misspelled Larson) worked as a seamstress and domestic servant. She would die in 1951 in Santa Monica, Los Angeles County.

Peter Walker, who is thought to be a mixed-race Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies, was her father. He was probably a descendant of Henry or George Walker, a white man from Albany, New York, who were believed to have settled in the Danish West Indies in about 1840. Racial boundaries in this Danish colonial society were more flexible than in the former slave states of the United States. Walker may never have described him as "Negro." He disappeared from the lives of Nella and her mother soon enough; she said he died when she was young. Chicago was brimming with immigrants at this moment, but the Great Migration of blacks from the South has yet to begin. The black population of the city was 1.3% in 1890 and 2.2% in 1910, at the start of Walker's lifetime.

Marie married Peter Larsen aka Peter Larson (b.) again. 1867, a fellow Danish immigrant, died. Anna Elizabeth aka Lizzie (married name Gardner) and the couple had a daughter Anna Elizabeth (married name Gardner) together in 1892. When settling on Nella Larsen, Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using the spellings Nellye Larsen and Nellie Larsen. The mixed family migrated west to a predominantly white neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants, but because of Nella, they were discriminated against. When Nella was eight, they were just a few blocks east of the city.

Darryl Pinckney, an American author and commentator, wrote about her strange situation:

Larsen toured Denmark with her mother and her half-sister from 1895 to 1898. Though she was unusual in Denmark due to her ethnicity, she had some fond memories from the period, including playing Danish children's games, which she later wrote about in English. She attended a large public school after returning to Chicago in 1898. As the migration of Southern blacks increased to the city, European immigration became more accessible. In the immigrant neighborhoods, where both groups competed for jobs and housing, racial segregation and tensions had risen.

Larsen's mother was hopeful that education would have given her a chance and encouraged her in attending Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. Larsen lived in 1907–08, for the first time, but she was also alienated from most of the students' backgrounds and life experiences, with most of them being from former slaves. Larsen was deemed "exiled" for some breach of Fisk's strict dress or conduct rules for women, according to biographer George B. Hutchinson. Larsen moved to Denmark on her own, where she lived for a total of three years from 1909 to 1912, and attended the University of Copenhagen. She continued to have trouble finding a place where she could fit after returning to the United States.

Later life

Larsen returned to New York in 1937, just as her divorce had been completed. In the divorce, she was given alimony that provided her with the financial stability she needed before Imes' death in 1941. Larsen stopped writing due to depression. Larsen returned to nursing and became an administrator after her ex-husband's death. She left literary circles. She lived on the Lower East Side and did not venture to Harlem.

Many of her elderly relatives suspected that she, like some of the characters in her book, had crossed the color line to "pass" into the white world. George Hutchinson, a historian, has said in his 2006 appearance that she remained in New York as a nurse.

Some literary scholars have debated Larsen's decision to return to nursing, deeming her decision to take time off writing as "an act of self-prescription" or "a "retreat" motivated by a lack of confidence and persistence. They forgot that it was impossible for a woman of color to find a stable career with also providing financial stability during that time period. Nursing was a "labor market that accepted an African American as a domestic servant" for Larsen. Nursing had always been something that came naturally to Larsen, as it was "one of the most appropriate options for assistance during the process of learning about the work." Larsen was spotted by Adah Thoms, an African-American nurse who co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, during her work as a nurse. Thoms had a passion in Larsen's nursing career and helped with Larsen's skills. Adah Thoms, who had made arrangements for Larsen to work at Tuskegee Institute's John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital, was the first Larsen family to study at Tuskegee Institute in 1915.

Larsen creates Brian, a doctor and husband of the main character from her medical school experience. Brian is ambivalent about his medical work, according to Larsen. Brian's character may also be based on Larsen's husband Elmer Imes, a physicist. After Imes divorced Larsen, he was closely affiliated with Ethel Gilbert, Fisk's director of public relations and boss of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, although it is unknown if the two married.

Larsen died in her Brooklyn apartment in 1964 at the age of 72.

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Nella Larsen Career

Nursing career

Larsen joined Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home in 1914, a pioneer in New York City. The institution was established in Manhattan as a black-serving hospital, but hospital services had risen in importance in the 19th century. The entire operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. The hospital patients were mainly white at the time; the nursing home patients were mainly black; the doctors were white; and the nurses and nursing students were black females. "No matter what situation Larsen found herself in, racial irony of one kind or another wraps itself around her," Pinckney says.

Larsen went south to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she eventually became the head nurse at the university's hospital and training academy after graduating in 1915. While at Tuskegee, she was introduced to Booker T. Washington's education scheme and became disillusioned with it. Larsen decided to leave after a year or so, despite poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee.

She returned to New York in 1916, where she spent two years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. Larsen was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse after scoring the second highest score on a civil service exam. She worked with them in the Bronx during the 1918 flu pandemic in "mostly white areas" and with white colleagues. She then spent time as a nurse in the city.

Librarian and literary career

Larsen spent nights and weekends with librarian Ernestine Rose to help with the first exhibit of "Negro art" at the New York Public Library in 1921. She became the first black woman to graduate from the NYPL Library School, despite being encouraged by Rose. Columbia University sponsored it, and it enabled the integration of library workers.

In 1923, Larsen took her certification exam. She spent her first year as a librarian at the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, which was predominantly Jewish. Alice Keats O'Connor, her white supervisor, was there to help her from Rose. They, as well as another branch manager where she worked, aided Larsen and assisted in the integration of the branch employees. Larsen moved to the Harlem branch because she was interested in the cultural excitement in the African-American neighborhood, which is a destination for migrants from around the country.

Larsen took a break from her work due to health issues in October 1925 and began writing her first book. Larsen resigned as a librarian in 1926 after making acquaintances with influential figures in the Negro Awakening (also known as the Harlem Renaissance).

She became a writer in Harlem's diverse literary and arts community, where she met Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer and writer, and became an acquaintance. Larsen wrote Quicksand, a largely autobiographical book, in 1928. If not for financial success, it received acclaim.

Passing, her second book, which was also highly acclaimable, was published in 1929. It was focused on two mixed-race African-American women who were childhood friends and had taken different paths of racial identification and marriage. One of the two black doctors and married a black doctor, while the other was white and married a white man without revealing her African roots. The book delves into the lives of adults who went back to work together again.

Larsen wrote "Sanctuary," a short story in which she was accused of plagiarism in 1930. "Sanctuary" was supposed to be based on Sheila Kaye-Smith's short story "Mrs. Adis," which first appeared in the United Kingdom in 1919. Kaye-Smith wrote on rural topics and was extremely popular in the United States. Any commentators thought the basic plot of "Sanctuary" and some of the book's excerpts and dialogue were virtually identical to Kaye-Smith's.

H. Pearce's comment has disapproved this assessment, arguing that "Sanctuary" is "longer, better written, and more specifically political, rather than class as in "Mrs Adis": "Sanctuary" is "more detailed, more concise, and more specifically about issues of race, rather than class. Larsen reworked and updated the story in a modern American black setting, according to Pearce. Pearce also mentions that in Kaye Smith's book "All the Books of My Life" she based "Mrs Adis" on a 17th-century tale told by St Francis de Sales, the Catholic bishop of Geneva. It is unknown if she was aware of the Larsen controversy in the United States. Larsen's self recalled the tale as "most folk-lore" after she was a nurse, who was a patient when she was a nurse.

No charges of plagiarism were established. Larsen was the first African-American woman to do so, earning a Guggenheim Fellowship even in the aftermath of the scandal, which was worth more than $2,500 at the time. She used it to travel around Europe for many years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, where she worked on a book about a love triangle in which all the protagonists were white. She never wrote the book or any other works.

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