Nella Larsen
Novelist
An American novelist of Danish and African descent, she was a minor figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920s, she published two novels: Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). The latter work is noteworthy for its ahead-of-its time examination of the gray area of sexual and racial identity.
Following her graduation from nursing school in 1915, she became a nurse at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She later worked in New York City as a librarian.
She briefly attended Fisk University in Tennessee.
She married physicist Elmer Imes in 1919. The couple divorced in 1933.
She was a friend of writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten.