Later works dealing with themes like racial injustice and the experiences of people of color in American society include Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, and James McBride’s 1995 memoir The Color of Water, which explicitly focuses on mixed-race identity. Not Without Laughter addresses the religion and class division in the African American community, while Their Eyes Were Watching God deals with race in American society. Both overlap with Quicksand’s themes of racial identity. Other Harlem Renaissance works include Langston Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. ![]() Larsen is one of several early 20th-century Harlem-based writers of color who are collectively known as Harlem Renaissance writers. Like Quicksand, it draws on Nella Larsen’s life and addresses the experiences of mixed-race women in early 20th-century American society. Her other novel, Passing, was published in 1929. Quicksand is one of two novels published by Nella Larsen in the 1920s. Quicksand Paperback Maby Nella Larsen (Author) 694 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 4.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial Hardcover 14.99 5 Used from 10.99 10 New from 14.99 1 Collectible from 46.40 Paperback 6.11 33 Used from 2.02 11 New from 5.55 1 Collectible from 32. Larsen is touted as the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement, and both of her novels have been taken up in academic settings as canonical explorations of race and gender in early 20th-century American life. Larsen is best known for her novels Quicksand and Passing, which are both semi-autobiographical, and feature raw, emotive explorations of complex race and gender issues. ![]() Larsen’s mixed-race heritage and life experiences had a profound influence on her novels, which focus on mixed-race characters attempting to figure out their place in the world. She died at the age of 72 in her apartment in Brooklyn. In 1933, Larsen and Imes divorced, and Larsen returned to her nursing career before receding from Harlem’s literary circles and moving to the Lower East Side. The first of these, Quicksand (1928), was modeled closely on her own life experiences, and received high critical acclaim. Larsen published a number of short stories and two novels in the 1920s. She became entrenched in the literary scene in Harlem’s bourgeoning African American culture. She married a physician named Elmer Imes, and the pair moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where Larsen began to work as a librarian and pursue writing. Larsen then enrolled in nursing school in New York in 1914, and went on to work in Alabama, and then New York. she attended Fisk College, a historically black university, but did not graduate. Larsen’s childhood was split between Denmark and the U.S. Nella’s mother remarried Peter Larsen, another Danish immigrant, and attempted to move to a more prosperous neighborhood of Chicago, but the family was targeted because of Nella’s race and returned to the original neighborhood of her birth. Nella’s father deserted the family when Nella was very young, and is believed to have died soon after. Nella Larsen was born in a poor neighborhood of Chicago, to a mixed-race father from the Danish West Indies and a white mother from Denmark.
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