Nella Larsen

Nursing career

In 1912, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home, an institution that was founded in the 19th century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve black people, whose hospital services had grown in importance. The total operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. At the time, the hospital patients were primarily white; the nursing home patients were primarily black; the doctors were white males; and the nurses and nursing students were black females.

Upon graduating from nursing training school in 1915, Larsen went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she soon became head nurse at its John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital and training school. While at Tuskegee, she was introduced to Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. As it was combined with poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee, Larsen decided to leave after a year or so.

She returned to New York in 1916, where she worked for two years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After earning the second-highest score on a civil service exam, Larsen was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse. She worked for them in the Bronx through the 1918 flu pandemic, in "mostly white neighborhoods" and with white colleagues. Afterwards she continued with the city as a nurse.

Marriage and family

In 1919, Larsen married Elmer Imes, a prominent physicist; he was the second African American to earn a PhD in physics. After her marriage, she sometimes used the name Nella Larsen Imes in her writing. A year after her marriage, she published her first short stories.

The couple moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where their marriage and life together had contradictions of class. As Pinckney writes:

By virtue of her marriage, she was a member of Harlem's black professional class, many of them people of color with partially European ancestry. She and her husband knew the NAACP leadership: W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson. However, because of her low birth and mixed parentage, and because she did not have a college degree, Larsen was alienated from the black middle class, whose members emphasized college and family ties, and black fraternities and sororities.

Her mixed racial ancestry was not itself unusual in the black middle class. But many of these individuals, such as Langston Hughes, had more distant European ancestors. He and others formed an elite of mixed race or people of color, some of whom had ancestors who had been free people of color well before the American Civil War. This had given many families an advantage in establishing themselves and gaining educations in the North. In the 1920s, most African Americans in Harlem were exploring and emphasizing their black heritage.

Imes's scientific studies and achievement placed him in a different class than Larsen. The Imes couple had difficulties by the late 1920s, when he had an affair with a white woman at Fisk University, where he was a professor. Imes and Larsen would divorce in 1933.

Librarian and literary career

In 1921, Larsen worked nights and weekends as a volunteer with librarian Ernestine Rose, to help prepare for the first exhibit of "Negro art" at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Encouraged by Rose, she became the first black woman to graduate from the NYPL Library School. It was run by Columbia University and opened the way for integration of library staff.

Larsen passed her certification exam in 1923. She worked her first year as a librarian at the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, which was predominantly Jewish. There she had strong support from her white supervisor Alice Keats O'Connor, as she had from Rose. They, and another branch supervisor where she worked, supported Larsen and helped integrate the staff of the branches. Larsen transferred to the Harlem branch, as she was interested in the cultural excitement in the African-American neighborhood, a destination for migrants from across the country.

In October 1925, Larsen took a sabbatical from her job for health reasons and began to write her first novel. In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening (which became known as the Harlem Renaissance), Larsen gave up her work as a librarian. She published short fiction under the pseudonym "Allen Semi" (an anagram of her married name, Nella Imes) in 1926.

She became a writer active in Harlem's interracial literary and arts community, where she became friends with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer and writer. In 1928, Larsen published Quicksand, a largely autobiographical novel. It received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.

In 1929, she published Passing, her second novel, which was also critically successful. It dealt with issues of two mixed-race African-American women who were childhood friends and had taken different paths of racial identification and marriage. One identified as black and married a black doctor; the other passed as white and married a white man, without revealing her African ancestry. The book explored their experiences of coming together again as adults.

In 1930, Larsen published "Sanctuary", a short story for which she was accused of plagiarism. "Sanctuary" was said to resemble the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith's 1919 short story, "Mrs. Adis". Kaye-Smith wrote on rural themes and was popular in the United States. Some critics thought the basic plot of "Sanctuary," and some of the descriptions and dialogue, were virtually identical to Kaye-Smith's work. According to George B. Hutchinson, the plagiary accusation was "probably valid."

The scholar H. Pearce disputed this assessment, writing that, compared to Kaye-Smith's tale, "Sanctuary" is "longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race—rather than class as in 'Mrs Adis'." Pearce thought that Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Pearce also noted that in Kaye-Smith's 1956 book, All the Books of My Life, the author said she had based "Mrs Adis" on a 17th-century story by St Francis de Sales, Catholic bishop of Geneva. It is unknown whether she knew of the Larsen controversy in the United States. Larsen herself said the story came to her as "almost folk-lore", recounted to her by a patient when she was a nurse.

No plagiarism charges were proved. Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship even in the aftermath of the controversy, worth roughly $2,500 at the time, and was the first African-American woman to do so. She used it to travel to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, where she worked on a novel about a love triangle in which all the protagonists were white. She never published the book or any other works.

Later life

Larsen returned to New York in 1937, when her divorce had been completed. She was given a generous alimony in the divorce, which gave her the financial security she needed until Imes's death in 1941. Struggling with depression, Larsen stopped writing. After her ex-husband's death, Larsen returned to nursing and became an administrator. She disappeared from literary circles. She lived on the Lower East Side and did not venture to Harlem.

Many of her old acquaintances speculated that she, like some of the characters in her fiction, had crossed the color line to "pass" into the white community. George B. Hutchinson has demonstrated that she remained in New York, working as a nurse.

While some scholars have interpreted Larsen's return to nursing as an "act of self-burial" or a "retreat" motivated by a lack of courage, this perspective disregards the historical reality that stable, financially secure employment was difficult for a woman of color to find during that period. For Larsen, nursing was a "labor market that welcomed an African American as a domestic servant". Nursing had been something that came naturally to Larsen as it was "one respectable option for support during the process of learning about the work." During her work as a nurse, Larsen was noticed by Adah Thoms, an African-American nurse who co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Thoms had seen potential in Larsen's nursing career and helped strengthen Larsen's skills. When Larsen graduated in 1915, it was Adah Thoms who had made arrangements for Larsen to work at Tuskegee Institute's hospital.

Larsen draws from her medical background in Passing to create the character of Brian, a doctor and husband of the main character. Larsen describes Brian as being ambivalent about his work in the medical field. Brian's character may also be partially modeled on Larsen's husband Elmer Imes, a physicist. After Imes divorced Larsen, he was closely associated with Ethel Gilbert, Fisk Director of public relations and manager of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, although it is unclear if the two married.

Death

Larsen died in her Brooklyn apartment at 315 Second Avenue on or about March 30, 1964, at the age of 72.

Her friend, Alice Carper, believed the body had lain in the apartment for several days before being found, expressing frustration that Larsen’s colleagues at Metropolitan Hospital had not investigated her absence sooner.

When her apartment was entered, valuables—including jewelry, vases, and antiques—had disappeared, and her papers were found scattered across the floor. The funeral service was held on April 6, 1964 and was attended by more than forty people, nearly all of whom were nurses.

She was buried in Alice Carper’s family plot in the "Garden of Memory" at Cypress Hills Cemetery, located on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Her husband had been buried in the same cemetery years earlier.

The New York Times published a brief death notice, which gave no indication of her literary success. It listed her as "Imes—Nella Larsen" and noted her profession as a Registered Nurse.

Legacy

Larsen was added to The Norton Anthology of American Literature in the Sixth Edition in 2002, which included Quicksand (1928).

In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her. She was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2022.

Larsen has been compared to other authors who also wrote about cultural and racial conflict such as Claude Mckay and Jean Toomer.

Larsen's novel Passing was adapted as a 2021 film of the same name by Rebecca Hall.