Light-skinned Black woman Irene Redfield encounters an old childhood friend - Clare - who is now "passing" as a White woman. Clare is married to a racist White man, who doesn't know she has African American blood....

Nella Larsen's "Quicksand" paints a poignant portrait of Helga Crane, a young woman grappling with her mixed racial heritage in the 1920s. Caught between societal expectations and her yearning for identity, Helga navigates different settings–the segregated South, bustling Harlem, and even...

Quicksand is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. This is her first novel and she completed the first draft quickly. The novel was out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s. Quicksand is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. Larsen dedicated...

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is hailed today as a significant literary work of Harlem Renaissance, though for several decades it, like all of her works, was out of print....

Light-skinned black woman Irene Redfield encounters an old childhood friend - Claire- who is now "passing" as a white woman. Claire is married to a racist white man, who doesn't know she has African American blood. In spite of the danger of being found out by her husband and society at large...

Helga Crane yearns to become more than she is and to feel the world more intensely. She consequently dismisses her native Chicago, New York's Harlem, Copenhagen even. She also passes on opportunities for extended family, for marriage, and for true love. What is always latent in this truly...

This collection brings together the powerful and thought-provoking works of Nella Larsen, a literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance, whose nuanced...