” Because of Larsen ’s reticence to reveal details about her life, an Amsterdam News interviewer labeled her “Madame X. Mary Helen Washington, author of Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860 –1960, has called her the “Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance. Davis, author of From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 –1960, suggested that Larsen was “the most elusive ” of Harlem Renaissance writers. Very little is known about Larsen ’s early life. One need also consider Larsen ’s own withdrawal from New York City ’s literary and social life in the late 1930s. ” Still, that Larsen passed into literary obscurity after earning a reputation as one of the most promising writers of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance should not be particularly surprising given the fate of other black American women writers.

McDowell questioned “why a career with such auspicious beginnings had such an inauspicious ending. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a vibrant sense of place.Įveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.When Nella Larsen ’s two novels, Quicksand and Passing, were republished in 1986 after decades of literary neglect, editor Deborah E. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Passing, Larsen’s best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the Black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. A Contemporary Classics hardcover omnibus of the complete fiction of one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including her most famous novel, Passing

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