Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
Part One: Encounter
Part Two: Re-Encounter
Part Three: Finale
Explanatory Notes
Nella Larsen, one of the most acclaimed and influential writers of
the Harlem Renaissance, was born Nellie Walker on April 13, 1891,
in Chicago. In the 1910s she came to New York, where she worked as
a nurse and a librarian, and in 1919 she married a research
physicist. She began publishing stories in the mid-1920s and
published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928. Passing came out the
following year. Larsen was awarded a William E. Harmon Bronze Award
for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes and a Guggenheim
fellowship. Encountering personal and professional struggles, she
was unable to have her third novel accepted for publication and by
the end of the 1930s had stopped writing altogether. She worked
full time as a nurse until her death in 1964.
Emily Bernard is the author of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem
Renaissance- A Portrait in Black and White. Her other books include
Remember Me to Harlem- The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van
Vechten (2001), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the
Year; Some of My Best Friends- Writers on Interracial Friendships
(2004), chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the
Teen Age; and Michelle Obama- The First Lady in Photographs (2009),
a book she coauthored with Deborah Willis, which received a 2010
NAACP Image Award. Her essays have been published in several
anthologies and journals, such as The American Scholar, Oxford
American magazine, The Best American Essays, Best African American
Essays, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is a professor of
English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of
Vermont.
Thadious M. Davis is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American
Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Nella Larsen- Novelist of the Harlem
Renaissance. She previously taught at Vanderbilt University, Brown
University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the
Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Center for
Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is the
editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Nella Larsen's Quicksand.
It is a tragic story rooted in inescapable facts of American life:
that whiteness conferred an almost universal unearned advantage,
and that loyalty to a black racial identity was not only an act of
pride but also one of courage
*The New York Times*
It is a tragic story rooted in inescapable facts of American life: that whiteness conferred an almost universal unearned advantage, and that loyalty to a black racial identity was not only an act of pride but also one of courage * The New York Times *
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