| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

George Hutchinson. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 611. $39.95.

After publishing two major novels in the late 1920s, Nella Larsen was considered by many observers to be the most important novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. But by the time of her death in 1964, she was all but forgotten. Larsen was rediscovered by scholars in the 1980s and was the subject of two biographies in the 1990s: Charles R. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (1993), and Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled (1994). In this new biography, George Hutchinson perceptively reinterprets Larsen's life, while reinforcing his argument from The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) that the Harlem Renaissance was not merely the failed creation of white paternalist patronage; rather, it was a successful cultural movement based on a pluralist sensibility that was shared by many black and white writers, artists, and publishers, notably Nella Larsen. Furthermore, Hutchinson deftly conveys "the amazing breadth and depth of Larsen's experience of 'the modern'" (p. 11) while living in Chicago and New York, and navigating careers as a nurse, a librarian, and a novelist.

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