After completing the one-year program, she worked as head nurse at the renowned Tuskegee Institute (Alabama). in 1914, Nella enrolled in a nursing school program in New York City. She then spent four years in Denmark with relatives. Not having any real connection with the students, who were primarily from the South, she once again felt out of place and dropped out after a year. For the first time, she was part of an all-black community. Nella attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee in 1907. The family moved to a mostly white neighborhood, and thus began a life in which Nella never felt a sense of belonging. To be the only non-white member of her family put her in a precarious position at the time. Her mother remarried Peter Larsen, another white Danish immigrant, with whom she had another daughter Nella took his surname. He may have died when Nella was quite young.
![nella larsen quicksand nella larsen quicksand](https://aalbc.com/author-photos/nella-larsen.jpg)
Nella Larsen’s mother, Marie Hansen, was a white Danish immigrant her father, Peter Walker, was likely of mixed race and from the Danish West Indies. Insightful Quotes from Passing by Nella Larsen Academic interest in race, history, and women’s studies have helped shed a new light on her achievements.
![nella larsen quicksand nella larsen quicksand](https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/lg_23e601-nella-larsen-harmon-awards.jpg)
The theme of her life, and in effect, her work, was a sense of never belonging - not to any community, nor even to an immediate family.
![nella larsen quicksand nella larsen quicksand](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oiS3yiMMfsI/WO_cwuzTlyI/AAAAAAAAokE/xFw0f94PcjUc06a_h0EcINBkOaGnkDACQCLcB/s1600/Nella%2BLarsen%2Bacclaimed%2Bnovelist%2Bfrom%2Bthe%2BHarlem%2BRenaissance%2B%2B.jpg)
Larsen was the first African-American woman to graduate from library school and to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Her body of writing was modest, but she was considered a respected voice of her time. Nella Larsen (Ap– March 30, 1964), born Nellie Walker in Chicago was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement.