Nella Larsen
Nurse, Librarian, and Harlem Renaissance Writer
Nella Larsen was born in Chicago’s South Side in 1891. Her parents were immigrants. Her mother was a Danish seamstress and her father was a Black cook from the Danish West Indies. At 16 she attended Fisk University’s Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee before leaving to attend the University of Copenhagen in Denmark from 1910–1912. When she returned to the States, she studied to be a nurse at Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, the first school for training Black nurses in the North. She graduated in 1915 and went to work as a head nurse at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The next year she moved back to New York to join the staff at Lincoln and the New York Department of Health.
When the Spanish flu pandemic struck the city in 1918, she decided to become a librarian. She went on to work in the Lower East Side and 135th Street branches of the New York Public Library. In 1919, she married Elmer Imes, a prominent Black Physicist and they lived in Harlem during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen earned a library science certification from New York Public Library / Columbia University in 1923, becoming the first Black female graduate of a library program in the United States.
By 1926, she published several articles in the magazine, The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children Under the Sun, a publication for Black children co-created by W.E.B. DuBois. She continued to publish her articles and stories with some success under the nom de plume Allen Semi (Nella Imes in reverse). In 1928 she published her autobiographical first book, Quicksand, under her own name, to critical acclaim. Her second book, Passing, was published in 1929 (and released as a movie on Netflix last year). Both works describe the tensions of identity and place-making as a light-skinned Black woman navigates white and Black social circles in 1920s America. Passing also tackles the otherwise “overlooked role of sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance” and has since become analyzed as a LGBTQ+ literary milestone due to its queer subtext. Based on the literary accomplishment of her two books, she became the first Black woman awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for literature in 1930, which allowed her to she travel through Europe.
Following the release of a short story in 1930, Larsen received accusations of plagiarism and although she continued to write, published no subsequent works thereafter and largely left the Harlem literary scene. She and her husband divorced in 1933 and following his death in 1941, it is documented that she returned to nursing at Bethel Hospital in Brooklyn for the remainder of her career until her death in 1964. Her biography Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled was published by Dr. Thadious Davis in 1994.
Sources
The information above was sourced from African American Writers, WTTW, Black Past, Black History Now, Early Bird Books, NY Times Obituary, and NY Times Magazine.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- National Black Nurses Association
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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