Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset
Born	April 27, 1882(1882-04-27) Fredericksville, New Jersey
Died	April 30, 1961(1961-04-30) (aged 79)

Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 – April 30, 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist.

Fauset was the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. She also was the editor and co-author for the African American children's magazine Brownies' Book. She studied the teachings and beliefs of W.E.B Dubois and considered him to be her mentor. Fauset was known as one of the most intelligent women novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, earning her the name “the midwife”. In her lifetime she wrote four novels as well as poetry and short fiction.

Life and work

Fauset was born on April 27, 1882 in Camden County, New Jersey. She was the daughter of African Methodist Episcopal Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset. Jessie’s mother died when she was a child and her father remarried. Fauset came from a large family mired in poverty. She attended high school in Philadelphia. She wanted to study at Bryn Mawr College but they circumvented the issue of admitting a black student by finding her a scholarship for another university and so she continued her education at Cornell University.^{[citation needed]} She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 with a degree in classical languages. It was speculated that she was the first black woman in the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Fauset later received her Master’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Following graduation Fauset became a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington DC, spending her summers in Paris studying at la Sorbonne. In 1919 Fauset left teaching and became the literary editor for the The Crisis alongside W.E.B. Du Bois until 1926. The two were also the co-authors of Brownies' Book. Fauset became intrigued with the writings of authors like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Claude Mckay and introduced them in the magazine. Fauset became a member of the NAACP and represented them in the Pan African Congress in 1921. After her Congress speech, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority made her an honorary member. Her first novel There is Confusion was published in 1924; three more followed.

Fauset married insurance broker Herbert Harris in 1929 at the age of 47. Harris died in 1958. She then moved back to Philadelphia with her stepbrother. Fauset died on April 30, 1961 from heart disease.

Literary works

All of Faucet's novels featured the stories of the African American middle class.. Her first novel There is Confusion is the love the story of a wealthy African American woman who falls in love with a medical student and dreams of being a dancer but is held back because of race. Published in 1923, her second novel Plum Bun is about an African American woman who desires to be an artist; and decides to do so by passing as white and rejecting her family and friends. The story ends with her embracing her race and finding true love with a black man. In 1931 she published her third novel Chinaberry Tree. Her last novel Comedy, a study of the tension between drama and narration, was published in 1933. Inspired by a Greek tragedy, it is another story studying the problematic of 'passing for white' by giving voice to an African American woman who can be seen as white. She passes for white in her everyday life and convinces her oldest children to do the same. The youngest child was too dark to pass which eventually leads him to commit suicide.

Selected works

Novels

• There Is Confusion (novel, 1924) (about an upper middle class African American family in Pennsylvania, later New York City, and its circle of friends, one of whom passes for white until radicalized; ISBN 1-5555-3066-4)
• Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (novel, 1928) (a further study of the passing phenomenon; ISBN 0-8070-0919-9)
• The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (novel, 1931) (set in a small New Jersey town; ISBN 1-55553-207-1)
• Comedy, American Style (novel, 1933)

Poems

• "Rondeau." The Crisis. April 1912: 252.
• "La Vie C’est La Vie." The Crisis. July 1922: 124.
• "‘Courage!’ He Said." The Crisis. November 1929: 378

Short Stories

• "Emmy," The Crisis. December 1912: 79-87; January 1913: 134-142.
• "My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein," The Crisis. July 1914: 143-145.
• "Double Trouble," The Crisis. August 1923: 155-159; September 1923: 205-209.

Essays

• "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress", The Crisis. November 1921: 12-18.
• "What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress." The Crisis. December 1921: 60-69.

Further reading

• Abby Arthur Johnson, "Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance." (1978)
• Joseph J. Feeny "Jessie Fauset of The crisis: Novelist, Feminist, Centenarian." (1983)
• Vashti Crutcher Lewis "Mulatto Hegemony in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset" (1992)
• Henry Louis Gates Jr, Nellie McKay, "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature", (2004)
• Kevin De Ornellas, Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color (Greenwood Press, 2006), edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu.
• "The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion", Yale Journal of Criticism, 12, 1 (Spring 1999), 89-111 by Jane Kuenz.
• American Woman Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Laurie Champion

External links

• Profile at "Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion"</ref>
• The Black Renaissance in Washington
• Jessie Redmon Fauset profile; "Voices from the Gaps", University of Minnesota
• Jessie Redmon Fauset at Find a Grave