In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line.

* In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line by George Hutchinson Harvard University Press, May 2006 $39.95, ISBN 0-674-02180-0

George Hutchinson demonstrates a keen capacity for meticulous research in his exhaustive unraveling of the fife of Nella Larsen, a biracial novelist and shining light of the Harlem Renaissance. Celebrated in the late 1920s for two works of fiction, Quicksand and Passing, both loosely influenced by her personal experiences, Nella Larsen was the first black woman to become a Guggenheim fellow; she was twice the recipient of the Harmon Award for literature; and she was the first African American known to have graduated from library school. Despite these accomplishments, Larsen has been characterized as a mysterious, tragic figure and a shape-shifter because she negotiated fame and success between and along the fault lines of race, class and gender--and then, disappeared.

Since Larsen's personal papers and manuscripts were lost after her death, Hutchinson summons her ghost, relying on circumstantial evidence, including insurance atlases, building blueprints, census data, employment records, newspaper clippings and the notes and daybooks of Larsen's mentor, Carl Van Vechten, the controversial author/photographer and collector of artifacts of black culture. Though he was called a culture vulture, voyeur and white decadent by some, it was through Van Vechten that Larsen made many life-altering liaisons, meeting Ethel Waters, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, and most propitiously, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, the publishers of Larsen's novels.

In telling Larsen's life story, a dance between privilege and alienation, racial pathing and sexual identity, Hutchinson recreates a dense, contextual road map of the Harlem Renaissance--event by event, dinner party by dinner party, after-hours joint by after-hours joint. He documents Larsen's interactions with a huge cast of characters, including James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Aaron Douglas, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and many others. While Hutchinson renders the frenetic pace and racial dynamics of the period with accuracy, the author introduces so many players that the sidebars and namedropping become mind-boggling, and intermittently, slow the pace of the storytelling.

Hutchinson corrects previous inaccuracies about Larsen's familial relationships and describes with balance how Larsen's star lost its luster when she was charged with plagiarism for putting the work of white author Sheila Kaye-Smith in African American dialect and claiming it as her own in the short story "Sanctuary."

Hutchinson also argues convincingly that most critics of her day missed Larsen's analysis of the complexities of racism, and how she used interior dialogues in her writing to reveal a treasure trove of information about the psychology of racism and its effects on the intimate lives of women.

Like Hutchinson's prior work, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, In Search of Nella Larsen is rich in detail about literature and culture, race relations, the evolution of intellectual thought and modernism, New York's bohemia and cabaret society, urbanization in Larsen's birthplace (Chicago), life in the South at the black institutional strongholds of Fisk and Tuskegee, and other relevant topics. At 487 pages, plus 100 pages of endnotes, In Search of Nella Larsen is not a light read, but it is essential for history buffs and students of the Harlem Renaissance.

* for BIBR recommended titles

--Reviewed by Sandra Rattley

Sandra Rattley is a writer and researcher in Washington, D.C.