[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 44 (Thursday, March 5, 2020)]
[House]
[Page H1523]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HONORING NELLA LARSEN

  (Ms. PLASKETT asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. PLASKETT. Mr. Speaker, this is Women's History Month. I rise to 
recognize Nella Larsen, who was born in Chicago in 1891. Her mother was 
a Danish immigrant and her father an immigrant from the Danish West 
Indies, what is now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands.
  Larsen attended school in all-White environments in Chicago until she 
moved to Nashville to attend high school. She later practiced nursing, 
served as a librarian in the New York Public Library, and, after 
resigning from that position, she began a literary career.
  Her first novel, ``Quicksand,'' won her a Harmon Foundation bronze 
medal. After the publication of her second novel, ``Passing,'' in 1929, 
Larsen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a first for an African 
American woman, establishing her as a premier novelist of the Harlem 
Renaissance.
  She died in New York in 1964.
  Her work explored the complex issues of racial identity and 
identification in her fiction. Though critics remain conflicted about 
her novels, ``Quicksand'' and ``Passing,'' there can be no question 
that they are significant, groundbreaking American literary texts. She 
received a number of awards for her writing.
  Along with her contemporary, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, Larsen is 
considered to be one of the most important female voices in the Harlem 
Renaissance. We remember her voice now.

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