Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School

Today’s guest-post is by Rafael Walker, Baruch College, CUNY. (Bio below.)

One hundred years ago today . . . Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen submitted her application to the Library School of the New York Public Library, in hopes of becoming a librarian. At the time, Larsen had just turned thirty-one and was approaching the third anniversary of her marriage to Elmer Imes, the second African American ever to receive a Ph.D. in physics. 

So much of this is anomalous. Here we find a woman, in the early twentieth century, married to a relatively prominent man and seeking to begin, not simply continue, a credential-requiring profession. Bring in race, and the situation gets even more complicated: Larsen was a woman of African descent applying to enter a field that, in this nation at least, had yielded no other successful black applicants—a woman, moreover, who was herself married to a man in a field that could boast scarcely better success in achieving racial parity. 

If you are tempted to label the Imeses a power couple based solely on that information, hold tight. Not only was librarianship not the sole sector in which Larsen made waves (obviously, she would go on to excel as a novelist); it wasn’t even the first. Before her marriage, Larsen had been a standout in the nursing profession. After a palate-cleansing trip to her relatives’ in Copenhagen—following expulsion from Fiske University (putatively for violating its priggish dress code)—the Chicago-born Larsen made her way to New York City, where she decided to enter nursing, the better-paying of the two respectable occupations open to educated nonwhite women at the time. As George Hutchinson, Larsen’s most recent biographer, has shown, Larsen was a star student, having earned the rare distinction of passing the RN licensing exam with honor and, once licensed, the second-highest score on health department’s civil service examination. Based on these auspicious beginnings, it’s no wonder that she should go on to a stellar career in nursing, in which she served both at the front lines, especially during the hellish years of the Spanish Influenza pandemic, and in positions of increasing authority, which included administration and teaching.

Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, was published in 1928 and her second, Passing, the next year. Before Larsen turned forty, then, this married woman already had had three serious careers. There is no denying that she was driven or that work helped to make this mixed-race woman feel the sense of autonomy that was so necessary to any sense of belonging she would acquire in Jim Crow America (that the first is prerequisite to the second is a point to which her fiction returns obsessively). But what her success in these careers also demonstrates is Larsen’s savviness in aligning herself with powerful people. During her training and early career as a nurse in New York, she cultivated a relationship with the pioneering nurse, Adah Belle Samuels Thoms, an important administrator at Lincoln Hospital (where Larsen got her start) and co-founder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Of course, Larsen’s marriage to Imes thrust her into the center of black New York’s cultural elite, which would bring her into contact with the man who would become her best friend and de facto literary broker, Carl Van Vechten. And, in her budding career as a librarian, she earned the respect of an epic figure in the history of the New York Public Library system, Ernestine Rose, Larsen’s supervisor during her time volunteering at Harlem’s 135th Street Branch Library, and a vital recommender for this applicant who, because of her background, was conspicuously short on references. As fond as critics and biographers have been of painting Larsen as solitary and perpetually alienated, it’s unmistakable that her skill in networking was indispensable to her successes in all her professional endeavors. Her library application stands as glaring testament to that fact.   

[Editor: We posted here about Ernestine Rose and Nella Larsen in the context of the 1921 exhibit of Black arts at the 135th Street Library.]

While the document highlights how deft Larsen was in leveraging relationships to attain her professional goals, it also, paradoxically, offers a glimpse of how independent she was in her thinking. Obviously, given that she was a woman of mixed racial origins in the sexist and racist U.S. of the early twentieth century, her decision to pursue nursing as avidly and self-assuredly as she did was daring; her decision, after marriage, to pursue two more and even more unlikely careers, first as a librarian and then as a novelist, was practically unheard of. Despite the unlikelihood of her professional biography, there would seem to be a logical progression to it: nursing provided the most socially acceptable entrée into wage-earning work, and then librarianship offered a transition into becoming a full-time novelist. 

At a macro level, this application provides an arc to her life story; at a micro level, it offers a peek into her thinking on one of the biggest problems facing her moment and one of the biggest factors shaping her work. As Barbara Hochman points out (in an essay useful for anyone interested in a more extensive treatment of Larsen’s application), after Larsen had submitted her application, someone else added the word “Negro” to her response to the question about “Nationality of father,” in an attempt, as Hochman notes, at “stabilizing unwelcome ambiguities in Larsen’s self-representation” (1178). Larsen’s reply here of “Danish West Indian” is, of course, accurate and answers the question just as it was posed, but it’s hard to believe that Larsen wasn’t aware of what the reviewers of her application wanted to know, of the kind of answer that their addendum makes clear they sought. She knew how maladroit her compatriots were at talking about race, that their attempts to clarify racial differences usually ended in solutions that simplified them. It’s easy to imagine the sardonic Larsen, in answering the nationality question in this puckish way, as fancying herself making sport with the library school’s admissions committee.

Interestingly, as I have discussed elsewhere, today’s readers of Larsen’s work have shown little less rigidity in approaching racial categories, as we observe from the fact that her two major works are still routinely talked about as if their protagonists’ dual racial heritages didn’t matter. I’m willing to bet that Larsen’s sense of humor would have been elastic enough for her to smile wryly at seeing the word “Negro” still being written over the stories of her mixed-race characters even a century after the word was written over her own life in her application to library school. 

– Rafael Walker, Apr 27, 2022

Rafael Walker is assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He has published on a variety of topics both in American literature and in higher education, and is the editor of a critical edition of Kate Chopin's work and of Broadview Press's inaugural edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing (forthcoming). He is working on two book-length monographs—one on the American realist novel and the other on biraciality in American culture. Twitter: @raf_walk

TAGS: Libraries, Black women, race, ethnicity, work, Harlem renaissance, literature, novelists, writer