Nella Larsen – Quicksand

Discussion Question 1:

Why is Helga Crane so dissatisfied with the teaching atmosphere at Naxos? Would you consider this atmosphere or surroundings as not advancing the studying among the students? (Chapters 1 + 2).

Discussion Question 2:

Why does Helga Crane consider Anne Grey as inconsistent in her attitudes towards race and lifestyle? (Chapter 9).

Fact:

The novel Quicksand is loosely based on experiences Larsen made in her earlier life, as she was the daughter of a Danish mother and a colored father, studied and worked in a Southern university and later went to New York to find work there. She also lived with her Danish relatives for a period of time, and later married a physicist, finding it difficult to find her place in society throughout all her life.

(http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Larsen_Nella.html). 

Nella Larsen, who worked as a nurse, and only published two novels and one short story, was considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", and although it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson, who was also and important writer during that period, preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression), eventhough many of its ideas lived on much longer.