Quicksand

About this book

Quicksand is Nella Larsen's first novel and one of the essential works of the Harlem Renaissance, a searching portrait of race, gender, class, desire, and spiritual dislocation in the modern world. Helga Crane is intelligent, restless, refined, and unable to find a place where she can live honestly within the expectations placed upon her. From the Black educational world of Naxos to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, and the rural American South, Helga moves through societies that alternately exoticize, patronize, discipline, desire, and confine her. Larsen's novel is brief, elegant, and devastating in its study of a woman caught between communities, identities, and incompatible visions of freedom.First published in 1928, Quicksand belongs at the centre of modern American fiction, African American literature, women's writing, and psychological realism. Larsen gives Helga Crane's inner life unusual force: her pride, intelligence, loneliness, aesthetic hunger, sexual unease, anger, and longing for escape are rendered with restraint and precision. For readers of Harlem Renaissance fiction, classic American literature, Black women writers, modernist fiction, and novels of identity and self-division, Quicksand remains one of the most important rediscovered works of the early twentieth century.