Nella Larsen

Born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a father from the Danish West Indies, Larsen grew up caught between worlds in a way her fiction would later dramatize with surgical precision. She trained as a nurse, then became one of the first Black graduates of the New York Public Library's library school.

Quicksand and Passing, published within a year of each other, won her a Guggenheim Fellowship (the first ever awarded to a Black woman) and a European sojourn to write more. Then a plagiarism accusation over a magazine story, followed by a scandalous, public divorce from her physicist husband, drove her out of literary New York entirely.

She spent her last three decades working as a nurse in Brooklyn, estranged from the literary world she'd briefly lit up, and was found dead in her apartment days after she died.