This book gives us clear insight to not only Larsen’s life through her character Helga, but also about racial issues at the time. Disillusioned with her husband and life, Helga gets into a depression as she realizes she is not happy in life. She falls into depression at the end, settling into marriage with kids and wonders what has happened to herself. Helga soon returns back to Harlem and finds herself falling into a depression as she finds god, and thinks God sent her there to marry reverend Green. She is accepted and praised there as she is thought of to be exotic to them, but soon leaves because she “can’t imagine living forever away from colored people” (94). She again moves away to Denmark this time with her white family. Helga finds herself having to leave once again and heads towards Harlem, where she is surrounded by black people who she thinks are hypocrites. Helga decides to leave the south behind to head up north to find contact with her uncle, who she finds out wants nothing to do with her since she is half black. She finds herself frustrated and unhappy at the school she teaches at which is surrounded by black people. Helga’s mother was white and her father was black. Her mother remarried a white man, leaving Helga to be brought up in a white family she never felt comfortable around. Helga continues to seek acceptance throughout the novel but never comes to find it. Quicksand is about a young lady Helga who is lonely and isolated, continuously dealing with issues being biracial. Nella Larsen’s issues with being biracial reflected clearly throughout her novel Quicksand. Although this novel was published after 1923, the copyright was never renewed and is therefore in the public domain.Dana Monreal on “Nella Larsen’s Continuous Battle with Race” Helga's restless search for identity is semi-autobiographical, inspired by Larsen's own struggles to reconcile her mixed heritage with the racism of 1920s America. As the novel opens, she suddenly decides to give up her teaching position and go north, back to her roots in Chicago. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a schoolteacher in the American south.

Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

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