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A review by zoracious
In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line by George Hutchinson
5.0
Involving an exhaustive amount of research, Hutchinson puts previous biographical works about Larsen to shame, and shows them in no uncertain terms that some of their assumptions about this so-called mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance are simply wrong. Larsen's is a story that is as fascinating (if not more so) than any of her books or stories, and Hutchinson tells her own story with great passion.
The third recent biographer to devote a major biographical study on Larsen (after Charles Larson and Thadious M. Davis), Hutchinson attempts to discover the reason behind Larsen’s absence from the pen and the public eye. While Davis and Larson suggest that this disappearance was due to Larsen’s inability to accept the blackness of her skin and internalization of the prevalent racism of her time, Hutchinson, in what he calls a “biographical reclamation” found in his eight years of research new data (including records at the New York Public Library, blueprints, census data, and documents owned by Harlem Renaissance recorder & Larsen’s mentor Carl Van Vechten) to paint a slightly different picture. While detailing the various people with whom she connected and providing insight into the plagiarism scandal, Hutchinson also, more notably, suggests that she did not pass during the final decades of her life but instead effected a productive and successful career change (and, was in fact not as light-skinned as was previously thought). While the use of Van Vechten’s documents is controversial because of his reputation as a Harlem voyeur, this is a good accompaniment to the previous research done by Larson and Davis, with some added information that paints a fuller picture of the writer popularly known as the mystery figure of the Harlem Renaissance. With illuminating conviction, Hutchinson argues that, though Larsen “never stopped thinking of herself as a Negro” (186), she deliberately chose not to live on either side of the color line and rejected the limitations of racial categories.
The third recent biographer to devote a major biographical study on Larsen (after Charles Larson and Thadious M. Davis), Hutchinson attempts to discover the reason behind Larsen’s absence from the pen and the public eye. While Davis and Larson suggest that this disappearance was due to Larsen’s inability to accept the blackness of her skin and internalization of the prevalent racism of her time, Hutchinson, in what he calls a “biographical reclamation” found in his eight years of research new data (including records at the New York Public Library, blueprints, census data, and documents owned by Harlem Renaissance recorder & Larsen’s mentor Carl Van Vechten) to paint a slightly different picture. While detailing the various people with whom she connected and providing insight into the plagiarism scandal, Hutchinson also, more notably, suggests that she did not pass during the final decades of her life but instead effected a productive and successful career change (and, was in fact not as light-skinned as was previously thought). While the use of Van Vechten’s documents is controversial because of his reputation as a Harlem voyeur, this is a good accompaniment to the previous research done by Larson and Davis, with some added information that paints a fuller picture of the writer popularly known as the mystery figure of the Harlem Renaissance. With illuminating conviction, Hutchinson argues that, though Larsen “never stopped thinking of herself as a Negro” (186), she deliberately chose not to live on either side of the color line and rejected the limitations of racial categories.