Nella Larsen 
Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 

Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 is the first comprehensive collection of Nella Larsen’s letters.

The continued interest on the part of readers, scholars, and publishers in Larsen’s life and works amounts to a veritable Larsen revival. While biographers and literary critics have referred to her correspondence, Larsen’s letters have until now been accessible mostly through archival research.


Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 will make Larsen’s correspondence more easily and broadly available to scholars, students, and general readers. The volume collects letters to Dorothy Peterson, Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White,  Edward Wasserman, Gertrude Stein, Charles S. Johnson, Robert Russa Moton, and George E. Haynes, and many letters are here published in their entirety for the first time.

Larsen’s references to contemporary events, national organizations,  writers, artists, and other prominent figures create a very lively sense of the intellectual and social context of the Harlem Renaissance and of Larsen’s active involvement in it. Larsen’s letters provide glimpses of the society of which she was a part through anecdotes by turns charming, amusing, irreverent, at times self-effacing, and witty.

Larsen’s letters point to her wide-ranging readings. They shed light into her relationship with the art of fiction, into her novels
Quicksand and
Passing, as well as into her personality, her marriage, and her relationships with friends and other artists.


Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 is an indispensable companion to her fiction that will enable readers ranging from the general public to scholars and educators to gain a deeper understanding of both the woman and the timeless beauty of her art.