NELLA LARSEN QUICKSAND FULL

Quicksand is also included in the Library of America collection Harlem Renaissance Novels: Five Novels of the 1920s. She never again published, spending the remainder of her life working as a nurse in a Brooklyn hospital. On the strength of her acclaimed novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), she became the first black woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, the latter of whom died when she was two, she worked as a nurse and a childrenвЂ™s librarian before her first story was published in 1926. Nella Larsen (1891вЂ“1964) was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

NELLA LARSEN QUICKSAND FULL

But hers is a fate full of ambivalence, in which even the faith and family to which she turns are forms of entrapment. Helga Crane, the books protagonist, is trapped in the. These works helped oppressed Africans Americans. Quicksand (1928) is the first novel to give a voice to the sexual desires of a black woman. 190267), and Nella Larsen (18911964) emerged, portraying complex, intelligent, sensitive black characters.

Learn all about Quicksand, ask questions, and get the answers you need. Only in cosmopolitan New York, encountering what Larsen describes as вЂњthe continuously gorgeous panorama of Harlem,вЂќ does she begin to sense that she may have found a place where she might belong. Historical and Literary Context for Nella Larsens Quicksand. Other relatives, in Copenhagen, fГЄte her as a gorgeous exotic, and arrange a relationship with a famous Danish artist, but fail to see her as anything other than a marriageable commodity. But she refuses to settle for the loveless future she envisions, hemmed in by petty conformities and the realities of southern racism, black as well as whiteвЂ“вЂ“and so she sets off in search a happier life, a journey recounted with great feeling and psychological precision in Quicksand. She has what some would consider a promising career in the South, teaching at вЂњthe finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country,вЂќ and a respectable fiancГ©. While she was not prolific her work was powerful and. Sensitive, proud, and beautiful, Helga Crane is the daughter (like Larsen herself) of a black West Indian father and a white Danish mother. Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Nella LarsenвЂ™s 1928 novel Quicksand tells the story of Helga Crane, the daughter of a Scandinavian mother and a black father. Nella LarsenвЂ™s immensely stylish debut novel follows the tragic arc of a young woman caught between worlds.

Increasingly recognized as one of the masterworks of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand (1928) turns the techniques of literary naturalism on questions of race, gender, and class, with unforgettable results.

Nella larsen quicksand