Title
In search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line / George Hutchinson.
ISBN
9780674021808 (alk. paper)
0674021800 (alk. paper)
Imprint
Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
Language
English
Description
x, 611 p. : ill., ports. ; 25 cm.
Call Number
PS3523.A7225 Z69 2006
Dewey Decimal Classification
813/.52 B
Summary
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphereʾs most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of Americaʾs racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations-only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nell Larsen, the ʺmystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,ʺ George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities. We see Larsen vividly as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line cultureʾs fundamental rule: race trumps family. Book jacket.
Includes information about African Americans in nursing, Chicago, color line, Counte Cullen, Denmark, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fisk University, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Elmer S. Imes, Spanish flu influenza pandemic, interracial marriage, James Weldon Johnson, miscegenation, Dorothy Peterson, New York Public Library (NYPL), black librarian, racial segregation, Ernestine Rose, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Walter White, Edgar C. Williams, etc.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 491-591) and index.
Nellie Walker
Inheriting the color line, 1892-1898
State Street years, 1899-1907
Turning south: Nashville and Fisk, 1907-1908
Coming of age in Copenhagen, 1908-1912
A Black woman in white: New York, 1912-1915
Rebel with a cause: Tuskegee, 1915-1916
A nurse in the Bronx, 1916-1919
Sojourner in Harlem: the dawn of the "Renaissance," 1919-1923
Rooms full of children: Seward Park and Harlem, 1923-1924
High Bohemia, 1925
The new Negro, model 1926
Quicksand
In the Mecca, 1927
Year of arrival, 1928
Passing
A star in Harlem, 1929
Trouble in mind, 1930
A novelist on her own, 1930-1932
The crack-up, 1932-1933
Letting go, 1933-1937
The recluse on Second Avenue, 1938-1944
Nella Larsen Imes, R.N.
