Passing: A Harlem Renaissance Classic of Race, Identity, and Social Performance - Hardcover

by Nella Larsen (Author)

Passing is Nella Larsen's powerful Harlem Renaissance novel of race, identity, class, marriage, and social performance in early twentieth-century America. The story centres on Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned Black women whose lives have taken sharply different paths. Irene lives within the Black middle class of Harlem, while Clare has crossed the colour line and lives as white, concealing her racial identity from her racist husband and the society around her. Their renewed acquaintance becomes increasingly charged with fascination, resentment, danger, and ambiguity, as Larsen examines the unstable boundaries between safety and desire, belonging and concealment, freedom and self-erasure.

With remarkable compression and psychological precision, Passing explores the pressures created by racism, respectability, gender expectation, social status, and the need to survive inside a hostile racial order. Larsen's novel is both a major work of African American literature and one of the essential texts of the Harlem Renaissance, notable for its restrained style, moral complexity, and unresolved emotional force. For readers of American literary classics, Black women writers, modernist fiction, Harlem Renaissance literature, and novels of racial identity and social constraint, Passing remains a brief but extraordinarily powerful work.

Author Biography

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in 1891 in Chicago. Her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an immigrant from the Danish West Indies. Larsen attended school in all white environments in Chicago until she moved to Nashville to attend high school. Larsen later practiced nursing, and from 1922 to 1926, served as a librarian at the New York Public Library. After resigning from this position, Larsen began her literary career by writing her first novel, Quicksand (1928), which won her the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal. After the publication of her second novel, Passing (1929), Larsen was awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship given to an African American woman, establishing her as a premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen died in New York in 1964.

Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two novels, Black Deutschland and High Cotton, and two works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He has also collaborated with Robert Wilson on theater projects, most recently an adaption of Daniil Kharm's The Old Woman. He lives in New York.

Maggie/Malachi Lily is a shapeshifting, black, nonbinary artist and moth from Philadelphia, PA. Seeking to combat our present day cravings for instant gratification and toxic individualism, they create works of art, literature, and programming that resonate spiritual light. They hope their work causes you to want to curl up in the sun and ponder, ideally with a cat.