About the Book
Born to a Danish seamstress and a West Indian cook, Larsen lived her life in the shadows of America’s racial divide. Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding her, and the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as lived by a person who embodied all its ambiguities and complexities.
Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction 1 • Nellie Walker 2 • Inheriting the Color Line, 1892–1898 3 • State Street Years, 1899–1907 4 • Turning South: Nashville and Fisk, 1907–1908 5 • Coming of Age in Copenhagen, 1908–1912 6 • A Black Woman in White: New York, 1912–1915 7 • Rebel with a Cause: Tuskegee, 1915–1916 8 • A Nurse in the Bronx, 1916–1919 9 • Sojourner in Harlem: The Dawn of the “Renaissance,” 1919–1923 10 • Rooms Full of Children: Seward Park and Harlem, 1923–1924 11 • High Bohemia, 1925 12 • The New Negro: Model 1926 13 • Quicksand 14 • In the Mecca, 1927 15 • Year of Arrival, 1928 16 • Passing 17 • A Star in Harlem, 1929 18 • Trouble in Mind, 1930 19 • A Novelist on Her Own, 1930–1932 20 • The Crack-Up, 1932–1933 21 • Letting Go, 1933–1937 22 • The Recluse on Second Avenue, 1938–1944 23 • Nella Larsen Imes, R.N. Epilogue Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index
Review :
In Search of Nella Larsen is a true challenge to conventional wisdom; there is no book like it in existence. The readings of Larsen's two novels make the case that she deserves to be reevaluated and considered the major Harlem Renaissance novelist of the 1920s.
-- Werner Sollors, author of Neither Black nor White yet Both and Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University
This biography of Nella Larsen, as much a cultural biography of Larsen's times as it is a story of her life, is a labor of love. It is extraordinarily well researched, comprehensive, and certain to be regarded, henceforth, as the definitive biography of Larsen's life. Larsen is a central figure for African Americanists, feminists, Americanists, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance. In arguing that literary studies has worked to reinforce a black/white, either/or binary, this book complicates our picture of both Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance. And, perhaps most importantly for readers outside the Larsen/ Harlem Renaissance circle, this book complicates our picture of racialized America by focusing on the cultural erasure of biraciality and by making vivid what that erasure has cost, not only for biracial Americans, but all of us. This is a major book. It will be widely read, widely discussed, and highly influential. It is, in every way, a big book.
-- Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Professor of English at the University of Southern California
This book is above all, about how one reconstructs a life when there's little evidence but the life is important; and how one does so when that person was, in addition, an African-American woman who flourished during a crucial era--the Harlem Renaissance--before vanishing in broad daylight, as it were. Other biographers have constructed their own intriguing accounts, but they did so without the seminal facts now available to us. This excellent biography, building on those accounts but also bold, fresh, and original, tells the story of a writer who was in her mind neither black nor white and who lived much of her time feeling like a shadow, but who created invaluable art out of her pain.
-- Arnold Rampersad, Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University, and author of the two-volume Life of Langston Hughes
George Hutchinson has delivered a definitive biography of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen (1891-1964)...[An] exhaustive and masterfully rendered narrative...[A] brilliant biography.
-- Evelyn C. White, Washington Post Book World
Hutchinson draws on previously unused resource material to offer a startlingly intimate portrait of a woman often presented as an obscure figure in accounts of the literary scene of the time yet who was, in actuality, smack-dab in the middle of debates about racial uplift and about black writers selling out amid the vogue among white bohemians to associate with black artists. Hutchinson disputes earlier portraits of Larsen as pathological and instead offers a nuanced look at a complicated woman wrestling with racial identity and a fear of abandonment through her novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Primarily through her relationships, and correspondence, with luminary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson brings Larsen to life in all her glorious complexity in this sparkling examination of a critical period in American racial and literary development. (starred review)
-- Vanessa Bush Booklist
Nine years in the making, George Hutchinson's exhaustively researched new biography offers a revelatory new reading of Larsen's life and work...In Search of Nella Larsen is a definitive biography.
-- Martyn Bone Weekendavisen
George Hutchinson...has produced what must be the definitive biography of Larsen. It's hard to think of a stone he hasn't looked under in his quest to establish the facts, correct mistakes and trace her private life. But Hutchinson's biography also manages to be an insightful reconsideration of a much-studied period in American literature and black cultural history...Hutchinson's respect for his subject is so great that one feels Nella Larsen can at last be at rest.
-- Darryl Pinckney The Nation
Remarkable...In Search of Nella Larsen is three books in one: in the words of the subtitle, it is "a biography of the color line," a study of official racism; it also incorporates a lively history of the Harlem Renaissance; and, most engagingly, it is a record of the hunt for a significant literary figure who slipped into oblivion at the moment she should have been making the most of her modest but genuine success (two well-received novels, garlanded by awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship)...Hutchinson's tenacious adherence to documentary evidence, wherever he can find it, makes even his account of Larsen's later nursing career absorbing.
-- James Campbell London Review of Books
George Hutchinson demonstrates a keen capacity for meticulous research in his exhaustive unraveling of the life of Nella Larsen, a biracial novelist and shining light of the Harlem Renaissance...[In Search of Nella Larsen] is essential for history buffs and students of the Harlem Renaissance.
-- Sandra Rattley Black Issues Book Review
Hutchinson takes the reader on an intriguing journey through Larsen's mysterious, often-befuddling life. He debunks the myths and lies about her, which were held as finite truths for most of the 20th century, by investigating primary sources that, for whatever reason, have been ignored by other Larsen biographers. Exploring more than the superficial aspects of her life as a biracial woman, the author presents as complete a picture as possible and does it without slighting her, as others have, for choosing to pursue a life outside the literature in her later years. This fluid, engrossing book not only treats the reader to a wonderful biography of one woman's life but also serves up a feast of literary and US history, setting Larsen against a visceral backdrop of a moment in time when anything and everything seemed possible for a race seeking its rightful place in the arts and politics. In short, Hutchinson paints a captivating image of a woman for too long overshadowed by literary figures considered more worthy of praise.
-- A. F. Winstead Choice
Hutchinson's work brilliantly reinterprets Larsen's life in the context of early twentieth-century race, class, and gender restrictions and is now the definitive biography of this key figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
-- Jerry Gershenhorn American Historical Review
