Who was Nella Larsen, the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance?
Born in Chicago into a bi-racial family, she traveled to Denmark, worked as a nurse, was the first black female graduate of a library school, wrote two of the major novels of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand and Passing, and was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his new biography, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson investigates the disputed and as yet unknown events of Larsen's life as well as the pervasive color line thinking that has influenced previous biographies of her. Yesterday the Washington Post Book World called Hutchinson's book "brilliant" and "a definitive biography."
Who is George Hutchinson? In the process of writing In Search of Nella Larsen he became "a detective, a real estate appraiser, a fire marshal, a genealogist, a snoop, and a legal aide." Read more about this sleuth and his remarkable discoveries in his interview with Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press Executive Editor for the Humanities.
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