Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 - April 30, 1961) was an African American editor, poet, essayist and novelist. She was the most prolific female novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.
Her life and work
Fauset was born in Snow Hill, New Jersey in Camden County as the daughter of Anna Seamon and Redmon Fauset, a Presbyterian minister. Her mother, Annie, died when she was still a little girl.
Fauset attended Philadelphia High School for girls, and graduated the only black student.After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, also the first black woman graduate in Phi Beta Kappa, and came to the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, in 1912 when it was only 16 years old. From 1919 to 1926 she served as the literary editor of The Crisis under W.E.B. DuBois. Eventually 58 of her 77 published works first appeared in the journal's pages. She is the author of four novels, including Plum Bun (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931). She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.
Fauset worked as a schoolteacher for many years and retired from teaching in 1944. She died in 1961 from heart failure.
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 by an experience in Arkansas which is described in retrospect)
- Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (novel, 1929) (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 1-5553-207-1)
- Comedy, American Style (novel, 1933)
Quotes
- "The Complex of color...every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children." - There is Confusion
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