Born: 27 April 1882, United States
Died: 30 April 1961
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Jessie Redmona Fauset
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Known as the “Midwife of the Harlem Renaissance,” Jessie Redmon Fauset spent years as the literary editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, before publishing her own works in her 40s and 50s. Born in 1882, she was the only African American in the 1900 graduating class from the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She attended Cornell University on scholarship, where she became the first African American woman accepted into the university’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. She completed her Bachelor’s in classical languages and would later earn a Master’s in French from the University of Pennsylvania.
Like so many women, she spent years teaching before becoming The Crisis’s literary editor in 1919. In this role, she brought Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes to public attention. She stayed in the post until returning to teaching in 1926. But while many women are known for having elevated the voices of others, Fauset was also a skilled essayist, novelist, and poet in her own right. Her shorter works were often featured in The Crisis, and she published four novels about the African American experience during and after her time at the magazine: There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933).
One important distinction between her novels and her works published in The Crisis is the audiences. While the magazine’s reach was certainly impressive, with a circulation of 100,000 in 1920, their primary focus was on African American readers. Publishing books that were reviewed in publications like the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, which had both significantly larger and broader audiences (with circulations of more than 608,000 and 345,000, respectively, in 1925), brought greater name recognition for Fauset and her work. Arguably more important, however, is the fact that bringing stories of a marginalized group’s experiences to more privileged audiences who do not share that marginalization typically increases empathy. Books like Fauset’s can help change views and, in turn, help change the world.
The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/the-new-negro-movement.html
Jessie Fauset (1882–1961) was reared in Philadelphia by her widowed father, a highly respected minister. A gifted student, she attended Cornell, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; the University of Pennsylvania; and the Sorbonne. She taught high school French and Latin before Du Bois hired her to work at The Crisis. As the literary editor (1919–1926) she introduced many Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, to the public. While with The Crisis, she also coedited The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921), a monthly children’s magazine. One of the Harlem Renaissance’s most prolific authors, Fauset contributed numerous short stories, poems, reports, reviews, and translations to The Crisis. Her four novels explored the lives of the Talented Tenth.