Jessie Redmon Fauset

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Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 – April 30, 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist. She wrote more books than any other African-American female novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.

Her life and work

Fauset was born in Snow Hill, New Jersey, in Camden County. She was 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 was the only black student to graduate. After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, also the first black woman graduate in the fraternity "Phi Beta Kappa". In 1912, when she was only 16 years old she started work at the NAACP's journal, "The Crisis". From 1919 to 1926 she was the literary editor of "The Crisis". She wrote 77 published works of which 58 were first published in the journal.

She is the author of four novels, There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933). She became an honorary member of the women's fraternity for academics whose work has really helped other people, "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) This book is about an upper middle class African-American family in Pennsylvania, later New York City, and its circle of friends.
• Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (novel, 1929) this is a study of racial identity 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)

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

References

Kevin De Ornellas has written five articles about Fauset in "Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color" (Greenwood Press, 2006), edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu. One article is a biography; the other four pieces analyze her four novels.)

• "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 0-7876-6618-1
• American Woman Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Laurie Champion

Other websites

• The Black Renaissance in Washington
• Jessie Redmon Fauset - Voices from the Gaps