As Larson wrote later, this soon changed following significant growth in the number of English-language books published by Nigerian authors.
[2] At the time, he was familiar only with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, but his experience in Nigeria was life-changing, and made him realize that his education had failed him: not only had he never been taught African literature, but he "had never read any work by a minority writer", as he later said.
[1] On his return to the US, he entered the doctoral program at Indiana University, studying comparative literature, and attained his PhD in 1970.
[1] American essayist and short story writer James Alan McPherson, cited in the same article, praised Opaque Shadows, as a "select[ion of] superb stories that focus, without self-consciousness or remonstration, on the human condition as it presently exists among a variety of African people".
[2] Larson was married on May 2, 1971, to Roberta Rubenstein, likewise a literature professor at American University, teaching modernism and contemporary writers, and co-editing the Worlds of Fiction anthology with him.
They had two children;[2] their daughter Vanessa is a copy-editor at the Washington Post;[1] their son Josh is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado.