LARSEN, Nella

Quicksand

First edition. Boards well worn, and a light tidemark in the bottom margins of the text, a fair only copy lacking the dustwrapper. Inscribed by the author in advance of publication to Dorothy Peterson: "For Dorothy Peterson, This sad tale of a girl who came to a bad end. Nella. March Seventeenth 1928." The first novel by Larsen, who was an active and engaged participant in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1929 she wrote her second and final novel, Passing and was awarded the Harmon Foundation's Bronze Medal. In 1930 she was the first African-American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. She traveled to Spain to write her third novel, but never completed it and returned to spend the last 30 years of her life as a nurse, the profession that she had trained for before her brief but intense writing career. The recipient, Dorothy Peterson was the model for the female heroine of Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven. According to Notable Black American Women (p.842-4), "Van Vechten...modeled the heroine of the novel, Mary Love -- the beautiful librarian concerned with her racial heritage, after Dorothy Peterson." He also modeled the home of another character on her home, which was one of Harlem's most important and well-attended literary salons. Peterson, who co-founded both the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, also devoted herself to collecting manuscripts of Harlem Renaissance notables, and eventually helped Van Vechten donate the material that was the basis for the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. She was a sponsor of the short-lived but influential periodical Fire!!, and was also reputed to be "the one Afro-American woman [Jean] Toomer [who soon after married a white woman] was once thought to care about." (Berry, p.214). A splendid association between two important women of the Harlem Renaissance.

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