In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line [Hardcover]

George Hutchinson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674021800 | ISBN-13: 978-0674021808 | Publication Date: May 30, 2006 | Edition: annotated edition

Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.

Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.

(20060521)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this biography of novelist Nella Larsen, Hutchinson (The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White) explores her work, life and place in social history, positing that the reason for Larsen's shadowy status as a writer of the Harlem Renaissance is tied to the shifting color line in American society. Larsen, whose mother was a Danish immigrant and whose father was a black laborer, identified with her blackness yet also confronted and struggled with prejudice within the Harlem literary community. She eventually withdrew from her friends and colleagues and pursued a successful career as a nurse. Cracking open the few authoritative narratives on Larsen, Hutchinson finds a noteworthy theme: "As I read these books, I recognized a pattern not atypical of the way children from interracial families had often been misunderstood and-there is no other word for it-pathologized." Not only does he put forth a correct and complete narrative of Larsen's life, but he also uses Larsen's story as a mixed-race woman of the Harlem Renaissance to portray the lasting issues of race and color politics from then until now.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Larsen's racial heritage--black West Indian father, Danish mother--was further complicated by her mother's later marriage to a white man, the birth of a white half sister, and an early life spent between Chicago's vice district and Copenhagen in the late 1800s. Estranged from her family, Larsen spent the remainder of her life looking for a place to belong, finding it, for a while, in the glittering Harlem Renaissance. Hutchinson draws on previously unused resource material to offer a startlingly intimate portrait of a woman often presented as an obscure figure in accounts of the literary scene of the time yet who was, in actuality, smack-dab in the middle of debates about racial uplift and about black writers selling out amid the vogue among white bohemians to associate with black artists. Hutchinson disputes earlier portraits of Larsen as pathological and instead offers a nuanced look at a complicated woman wrestling with racial identity and a fear of abandonment through her novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Primarily through her relationships, and correspondence, with luminary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson brings Larsen to life in all her glorious complexity in this sparkling examination of a critical period in American racial and literary development. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; annotated edition edition (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674021800
• ISBN-13: 978-0674021808
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,245,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unveiling Nella Larsen, July 19, 2006

By 

Michele L. Simms-Burton (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Hardcover)

Nella Larsen was an enigmatic writer of the Harlem Renaissance, whose background has been highly speculated by other biographers, Charles Larson and Thadious Davis. George Hutchinson's superb biography of Nella Larsen puts to rest a lot of the speculation about Ms. Larsen's background. Mr. Hutchinson unveils some of the more complicated issues regarding Larsen's relationship with her mother and family, her life in Denmark, and her obscurity as a writer after the Harlem Renaissance. By thoroughly examining the papers of Carl Van Vechten, passenger ship logs, and other archives untouched by previous biographers, Hutchinson gives voice to the complicated negotiations regarding race that plagued Larsen during an era when the color line figured so prominently in most American's lives. Hauntingly told and beautifully written, this biography of Nella Larsen is essential to not only putting her life in perspective but also for enriching any reading or teaching of Larsen's novels. Hutchinson places Larsen, the writer, and her works within the center of the Harlem Renaissance, and he contextualizes Larsen and her work within the larger modernist moment when Larsen meets Frederico Garcia Lorca during his brief stay in New York when he was studying at Columbia. Even biographers of Lorca have neglected to put a face to the "Negroes" that Lorca wrote about as being the only authentic and uncorrupted aspect of U.S. culture and life that he found palatable. Hutchinson's biography paves the way for refiguring Larsen and the significance of her work to both the African American and American literary canons.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and well researched, July 1, 2006

By 

Mary Jane Harlan - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Hardcover)

This very elegant and academically excellent work was thought provoking. It should prove of great interest to anyone interested in the reality of life for black women facing the societal restrictions of the past. It provides both a unique perspective and a story that draws the reader to this dynamic historical figure and her place in history. The author provides extensive documentation of his resources and uses even the most ordinary of life's details to show the influence of color on the life and times of an extraordinary woman.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Wrong Woman, December 2, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Hardcover)

I enjoyed Dr. Hutchinson's book on Nella Larsen, the enigmatic nurse who wrote two marvelous novels in mid-career and then, took up her tents and wrote no more. Wow, does he lay into Larsen's two previous biographers! Sometimes it seems as though the whole purpose of him writing this book is to serve as a massive corrective to what he sees as their stupidity, their errors, their evasions, their sloppy thinking. This gives the book a lot of energy, and perhaps prompted Hutchinson to perform some brilliant feats of detective work. For example, he was able to prove that Nella Larsen actually did live in Denmark, for others had doubted her stories of a childhood in Copenhagen, seeing the purported fantasy as yet another manifestation of her self-hatred and the way she wanted to be white, not black.

It is thrilling indeed to get the whole picture of this complex life, even at the expense of the two previous biographers who must now forever lay at Hutchinson's feat, their every inanity exposed to a sneering public. And yet, as he knows, without these two having done so much groundwork, such as locating and interviewing friends of Larsen's now lost to us through death, he wouldn't have been able to accomplish zilch. So his triumph is clouded by a blur of ironies, as I'm sure he appreciates, ironies worthy of a Larsen novel.

I enjoyed especially Hutchinson's calm treatment of Larsen's final years, which saw her leave literature and the "glitterati" of the Van Vechten circle behind, in favor of a nursing career, which most people have seen as a terrible tragic turn of fate, and now under Hutchinson's treatment, he's very persuasive that being a nurse isn't, perhaps, such a bad thing at all, for nurses help people nearly as much as, perhaps more than, we novelists do. He is occasionally overgiven to speculation, such as his suggestion that "it is not unlikely" that Larsen chose night duty (while nursing) because she could "control and cover her drinking habit better that way." Why is it not unlikely? Does this mean that it is likely? How do you know, Dr. Hutchinson? And what about the part where, because one personage receives an unexpected visit on a Saturday, does that indicate that the visitor most likely worked on weekdays? Excuse me?

All in all, essential reading for anyone interested in either the Harlem Renaissance or in the life of American nurses in midcentury.