ab CHAPTER 1 The Many Lives of Nella Larsen When Nella Larsen was born there in 1891, Chicago was a thriving indus- trial city, its neighborhoods marked by ethnic divisions among European immigrants who had arrived during the previous generations. It was poised to begin absorbing another wave of immigrants who would arrive from East- ern and Southern Europe between the last decades of the 19th century and World War I as well as African Americans who would move north during the Great Migration beginning in 1910. Larsen’s own family mirrored some of these American ethnic characteristics. Her mother, Mary Hansen Walker Larsen, was a white woman from Denmark, where many relatives remained. Her father, Peter Walker, was a black man who had been born in the Carib- bean. Nella Larsen’s identity as a mixed-race person situated within her spe- cific mixed-race family would profoundly affect her experience of the 20th century, for as W. E. B. Du Bois so famously prophesied, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (The Souls xxxi). As is true of many individuals who achieve some degree of fame but whose lives are otherwise obscure, Nella Larsen presents challenges to her biographers, especially when those biographers are working long after their subject’s death and the deaths of most of her acquaintances. Larsen’s most prominent biographers are Thadious M. Davis, author of Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance A Woman’s Life Unveiled, published in 1994, 30 years after Larsen’s death, and George Hutchinson, who published In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line a little over a decade later.1 Most of the information we have about 1. These two biographies are quite different from each other, emphasizing different material and directed toward different purposes. Thadious M. Davis and George Hutchin- son disagree on a number of points, including several factual details, related to Larsen’s life. Through additional research, Hutchinson was able to clarify some matters that
Previous Page Next Page