Larsen called the emotional experiences of the novel "the awful truth" in a letter to her friend Carl van Vechten.
Her early years were spent with her Danish mother and White step-father who loathed her, and there began her torn relationship with her split identity.
The novel begins with Helga teaching at a southern black school in Naxos (thought by critics to reflect Larsen's experiences of the Tuskegee Institute and Fisk University).
Helga's anger at the sermon incites her first attempt to escape oppression: she quits her job and moves home to Chicago.
Unemployed and in desperation, Helga is saved by a few days working as secretary to the black, wealthy but brash Mrs. Hayes-Rore, who is a prominent activist concerning the "race problem".
An unexpected inheritance from her uncle enables Helga to make her third flight, this time moving to the home of her well-to-do maternal aunt Katrina in Copenhagen.
Although she enjoys the life of leisure she enters in Denmark and an escape from the structural racism of America, she is exoticised and sexualised, not least by a prominent painter, Axel Olsen, whose offer of marriage Helga refuses.
Fully indulging in an intimate relationship with a man for the first time, Helga is forced to exist in one space and becomes stuck, becoming disillusioned with religion once more.
The term was "coined from something Gertrude Stein witnessed the owner of a garage saying to his young employee, which Hemingway later used as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926): "You are all a lost generation."
This accusation referred to the lack of purpose or drive resulting from the horrific disillusionment felt by those who grew up and lived through the war, and were then in their twenties and thirties.
From 1910 to the 1930s, Harlem was in the "golden period" or the "Roaring 20's"[8] and was shaping the path for many African Americans to display their art of music, dance, literature, and much more.
Many famous artists still known today were born in the Harlem Renaissance – for example, writer Langston Hughes, poet Countee Cullen, jazz musician Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and her musicals, and painter Aaron Douglas.