Nella Larsen

"Nella Larsen's second novel, Passing, first published in 1929, is a fascinating exploration of race and identity set amidst the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for...

"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,...

Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific, her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both of her novels, "Passing" and "Quicksand", as well as all three of her published short stories; "Freedom," "The Wrong Man", and "Sanctuary". "Quicksand" was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance...

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...

Between 1926 and 1930--the golden era of the Harlem Renaissance--Nella Larsen became the first black woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Here, for the first time in one volume, are Larsen's novels "Quicksand" and "Passing" with corrected endings, along with three short stories.

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,...

Twenty-eight stories with themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplife the race.