Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen, born Nellie Walker, was an American novelist who also worked as a nurse and a librarian. Her reputation rests on a very small body of work: two novels, Quicksand, published in 1928, and Passing, published in 1929, together with a few short stories. Both novels examine racial and sexual identity, and they have drawn sustained academic attention since interest in her writing revived in the late twentieth century. Critics have described her as the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance and also as an important figure in American modernism, so she is read both as a voice of Black American cultural life in the 1920s and as part of the wider modernist movement in prose fiction.