Knowra Jessie R. Fauset Jessie R. Fauset Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, and editor whose work and editorial leadership helped shape the Harlem Renaissance.
W. E. B. Du Bois : An American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and editor who co-founded the NAACP. As editor of The Crisis, he hired Fauset as literary editor and published her work.
There Is Confusion : Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1924 novel about a Black family pursuing artistic and social ambition. Fauset’s first novel examines class, race, and cultural achievement in Black Philadelphia and New York.
Harlem Renaissance : A flowering of African American arts, literature, and intellectual life centered in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Fauset’s novels and editorial work were among the movement’s defining contributions.
The Talented Tenth : W. E. B. Du Bois’s proposal that educated Black leaders could advance the wider African American community. Fauset’s fiction depicts both the promise and the social pressures surrounding elite respectability.
Langston Hughes : An American poet, novelist, and playwright whose writing became central to the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset encountered Hughes’s early poetry while editing The Crisis and helped bring it to publication.
Plum Bun : Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928 novel about a light-skinned Black woman who passes as white. Its heroine’s choices make racial passing and its personal costs the novel’s central conflict.
New Negro movement : A cultural and political movement that promoted Black self-definition and artistic achievement in the early twentieth century. Fauset’s writing and editing helped express its challenge to racist representations.
Passing (novel) : Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about two Black women whose lives intersect through racial passing. Larsen’s compressed, ambiguous treatment of passing contrasts with Fauset’s broader social canvas in Plum Bun.
Nella Larsen : An American novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, known for Quicksand and Passing. Like Fauset, Larsen wrote novels exploring race, gender, and middle-class Black life.
The Chinaberry Tree : Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1931 novel about Black women, family, and social constraints in a small town. The novel turns Fauset’s attention to women’s options within family and community life.
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