Nella Larsen - Biography

Biography

She was born Nellie Walker in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891, the daughter of Marie Hanson, a Danish immigrant, and Peter Walker, a West Indian man of predominantly African descent from Saint Croix, who soon disappeared from her life. Her mother was a domestic worker.

After her mother married Peter Larsen, a Scandinavian, they had another daughter together. Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled as Nellye Larson, Nellie Larsen and, finally, settling on Nella Larsen. The mixed family encountered discrimination among the ethnic white immigrants in Chicago of the time. The author and critic Darryl Pinckney writes, as importantly,

"as a member of a white immigrant family, she had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up."

As a child, Larsen lived a few years with her mother's relations in Denmark. Her mother believed in education and supported Larsen in attending Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically black university. She was there in 1907-08, and the biographer George Hutchinson speculates that she was expelled for some violation of Fisk's strict dress or conduct codes. Larsen returned to Denmark for four years and then came back to the U.S., but struggled to find a place of her own.

In 1914, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home. Founded in the nineteenth century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve blacks, the hospital elements had grown in importance. The total operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. At the time, the nursing home patients were primarily black; the hospital patients were primarily white; the doctors were male and white; and the nurses and nursing students were female and black. As Pinckney writes, "No matter what situation Larsen found herself in, racial irony of one kind or another invariably wrapped itself around her."