Though she and Imes were regular socialites, both in Harlem and in white intellectual circles in Greenwich Village, Larsen immersed herself in literature during her private time. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Walter White. A prominent member of Harlem’s elite class, Imes provided an entrée for Larsen to become acquainted with the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance including W.E.B. Also in 1919, Larsen married the well-known physicist, Elmer Imes (he was the second African American to earn a Ph.D. After the chaos of the Spanish flu pandemic that struck the city in 19, she decided to become a librarian and was employed at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. In 1916, Larsen returned to New York where she worked as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After graduating from that program in 1915, Larsen briefly took a position with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, working as a head nurse.
On her return to the United States, she studied to be a nurse in New York. Regarding being seen in public with her family, she said her racial ethnicity “might make it awkward for them, particularly my half-sister.” But Larsen was captivated by mixed race dynamics, which would become central themes in her novels, and after studying at Fisk for only one year, she moved to Denmark for the next four years, attempting to learn about that half of her ancestry. The move to Nashville served to distance Larsen from her family, something she welcomed because of the shame she had been made to feel during her upbringing. Growing up in a white Chicago suburb, Larsen attended public schools until 1907 when at age 16, she enrolled at Fisk University’s Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee. This difficult dynamic was exacerbated by her claim that Peter Larsen was ashamed of his African American daughter. Whatever the facts, when Larsen’s younger sister was born, Larsen herself was the only visibly black person in her nuclear family. Official marriage records and documents regarding the name change to Nella Larsen are nonexistent, leading some historians to believe that Peter Walker and Peter Larsen were the same man, and that the former had simply wanted to reinvent himself and become “White.” Larsen’s tendency throughout her life to invent stories and hold fast secrets only fed the mystery of her young life. Her mother remarried a white man named Peter Larsen. Soon after Larsen was born, her father disappeared. Her father, Peter Walker, was a black cook from the West Indies, and her mother, Mary Hanson, was a Danish seamstress. Larsen was born Nellie Walker on April 13, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois, to immigrant parents. She spent the last 30 years of her life in obscurity as a nurse in New York City. Most famous for her two books, Passing and Quicksand, she disappeared from the public eye after a plagiarism accusation and a high-profile divorce. 1891-1964 Nella Larsen, an acclaimed novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, became the first African American woman to win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
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