TheCompleteFictionofNellaLarsen

Contents Foreword by Marita Golden Introduction by Charles R. Larson The Wrong Man Freedom Sanctuary Quicksand Passing Part One—Encounter Part Two—Re-encounter Part Three—Finale Nella Larsen—A Chronology Foreword Nella Larsen’s heroines are emotional nomads, women whose intelligence and genius for rebellion make them ill suited for the proscribed existence ordained by whites for blacks in 1920s and ’30s segregated America. No tragic mulattoes here. These prim, proper colored ladies bristle with discontent and yearning. But, most important, they are driven by the impulse to shape their lives rather than suffer them, even when their grasp is unsure and they are careening full tilt towards disaster. In Helga Crane and Clare Kendry, Nella Larsen has created two characters that are rich, complex, and contradictory. Quicksand and Passing launch each woman on a quest for self that predicts the themes of much of the most important writing in American literature of the last twenty years. Inevitably, any writer whose female protagonists resist the expected, the traditional, the “correct,” is dialoguing with the literary legacy of Nella L......