” Larsen herself revealed only that she was born in 1901 in Chicago to a white Danish mother and a black Danish West Indian father who died when Larsen was very young. ” Because of Larsen ’s reticence to reveal details about her life, an Amsterdam News interviewer labeled her “Madame X. Mary Helen Washington, author of Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860 –1960, has called her the “Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance. Davis, author of From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 –1960, suggested that Larsen was “the most elusive ” of Harlem Renaissance writers. Very little is known about Larsen ’s early life. One need also consider Larsen ’s own withdrawal from New York City ’s literary and social life in the late 1930s. ” Still, that Larsen passed into literary obscurity after earning a reputation as one of the most promising writers of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance should not be particularly surprising given the fate of other black American women writers. McDowell questioned “why a career with such auspicious beginnings had such an inauspicious ending. When Nella Larsen ’s two novels, Quicksand and Passing, were republished in 1986 after decades of literary neglect, editor Deborah E.
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