Print
Email
Cite
Fauset, Jessie Redmon
Influential African American novelist and editor during the Harlem Renaissance.Poet Langston Hughes referred to Jessie Redmon Fauset as one of “the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being,” a statement that reveals how influential Fauset was as an editor during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Fauset was also the era's most prolific black novelist, publishing four books between 1924 and 1933. In both capacities, Fauset helped shape one of the most important movements in African American literature.Fauset was born in what is now Lawnside, New Jersey, and grew up in Philadelphia. She hoped to attend Bryn Mawr College, but instead of admitting a black student, Bryn Mawr arranged for Fauset to receive a scholarship to Cornell University. There, Fauset became the first black woman in the country to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honorary society. She began corresponding with the noted black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, whose work she admired, forming an association that would become the cornerstone of her literary career.After graduation Fauset moved to Washington, D.C. There she taught at the prestigious all-black M Street (later Dunbar) High School from 1905 to 1919 while taking courses toward a master's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1912, Fauset was also a literary contributor to The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which Du Bois edited. When The Crisis created the position of literary editor at its New York office in 1919, Du Bois offered it to Fauset, and she accepted.At The Crisis Fauset cultivated the talents of many younger Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. Under her tenure, the Crisis became one of the major publishing outlets for black writers at the time. But Fauset also published short stories, essays, reviews, and poems of her own in both The Crisis and its short-lived children's magazine, The Brownies' Book. In 1924 she published her first novel, There Is Confusion. Many of her stories and all four of her novels feature light-skinned, middle-class black protagonists. Fauset stated that one of her goals was to present normally “the homelife of the colored American,” without the melodrama or caricature that she often saw in the work of white writers. But her fiction did explore the ways in which race and gender affect characters, even in their domestic lives.Fauset left her position at The Crisis in 1926 and took another teaching job, this time in New York. Although There Is Confusion had been well received by black critics, she still had difficulty securing publishers for her later novels—perhaps because she was a novelist at a time when black poets were in vogue. But she continued to write, publishing Plum Bun in 1929, The Chinaberry Tree in 1931, and Comedy: American Style in 1933. In 1929 Fauset married insurance broker Herbert Harris, and in the early 1940s they moved to Montclair, New Jersey, signaling her formal retirement from the New York scene. After Harris died in 1958, Fauset lived with her stepbrother in Philadelphia until her death on April 30, 1961. Jessie Fauset left a lasting impression on the African American literary tradition at a formative period, through both her profound influence on the authors she nurtured and the merits of her own work.See also Women Writers, Black, in the United States.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
