Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 - April 20, 1961) was an African American editor, poet, essayist and novelist. She was the most prolific female novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Her life and work
Fauset was born in Snow Hill, New Jersey in Camden County as the daughter of Anna Seamon and Redmon Fauset, an African Methodist Episcopal minister. Her mother, Annie, died when she was still a little girl.
Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, possibly the first black woman in Phi Beta Kappa, and came to the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, in 1912 when it was only 16 months old. From 1919 to 1926 she served as the literary editor of The Crisis under W. E. B. Du Bois. Eventually 58 of her 77 published works first appeared in the journal's pages.
Fauset worked a schoolteacher for many years and retired from teaching in 1944. She died in 1961 of heart failure.
Novels
- There Is Confusion (novel, 1924) (about a light-skinned African American who temporarily passes for white)
- Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (novel, 1929) (a further study of the passing phenomenon; ISBN 0807009199)
- The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (novel, 1931) (set in a small New Jersey town; ISBN 1555532071)
- Comedy, American Style (novel, 1933)
Some essays by Fauset
- "Some Notes On Color", The World Tomorrow (March, 1922)
Quote
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
References
- "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.
- Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion ISBN 0787666181
- American Woman Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Laurie Champion