Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) was an influential editor, novelist, essayist, and educator who played a major role in defining African American literature in the 1920s.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Storyteller was an influential editor, novelist, essayist, and educator who played a major role in defining African American literature in the 1920s. She also helped to usher in the Harlem Renaissance with her patronage of some of its most important artists. Her own critically acclaimed work was revolutionary in its focus on honest portrayals of the Black community, particularly the Black middle class. She wrote on themes that had rarely been explored in American literature, including colorism and passing. Please welcome Jessie Redmon Fauset.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was born on April 27, 1882 in Fredericksville, New Jersey to Redmon and Annie Fauset. She was the youngest of seven children.
When Jessie was very young, her mother passed away. From then on she was mostly raised by her father, a minister, and eventually his second wife, who was a white, Jewish woman. Her father put great emphasis on the importance of education for his children and Jessie’s innate intellectual curiosity was nurtured from an early age.
By the time she was in high school, Jessie’s family had moved from New Jersey to Philadelphia where she attended the prestigious Philadelphia High School for Girls. She was the only Black student in her class. After graduating as valedictorian, Jessie received a scholarship to attend Cornell University where she was one of the first Black women accepted into the renowned academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. She graduated in 1905 with a degree in Classical Languages.
After graduation, Jessie moved to Baltimore to teach for a year before relocating to Washington, D.C. There, Jessie took a position teaching French and Latin at Dunbar High School, which was considered the “classical academic high school” for Black students in DC. During her summers, she travelled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.
In 1918, Jessie became a regular contributor to The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP started by W.E.B. Dubois eight years earlier. At first, her contributions were in the form of letters to the magazine’s “Looking Glass” column, but by July 1919 Dubois had personally asked Jessie to move to New York City and become the magazine’s full-time literary editor. Just a few months later, she was not only serving as an editor but had also taken over most of the magazine’s organizational duties.
In her position as literary editor of The Crisis, Jessie played a pivotal role in nurturing the careers of many of the young Black writers who became stalwarts of the Harlem Renaissance. These included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Nella Larson, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and many more. Jessie was the first person to publish Langston Hughes, a giant of American poetry. In his memoir, Hughes wrote that Jessie was one of the three people who “midwifed the so-called New Negro Literature into being.”
But Jessie did more than publish other people’s stories. She was also a brilliant writer in her own right. She contributed many poems, short stories, essays, translations, and editorials to The Crisis during her time there. One of her most popular pieces was a five essay series on a six month trip she took to France and Algeria in 1926.
Her writing prowess extended beyond the magazine. In 1924, Jessie published her first novel, “There is Confusion” which received an excellent reception from her peers. Her impetus for writing the book was a desire to create an accurate depiction of Black life in America. She wanted to specifically depict the Black community of middle-class professionals that she belonged to and that had grown exceptionally thanks to the Great Migration. She was looking to shine a light on issues and problems, both existential and everyday, that were actually relevant to their lives.
In 1927, Jessie left her job as literary editor at The Crisis after a series of conflicts with Dubois, though she continued to be listed as a contributing editor. She took a job teaching French at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and continued to write in her free time. The following year she finished her second novel, the critically acclaimed “Plum Bun.” It explores themes of cultural struggle like “passing” and what it means to claim one’s identity in a world that punishes you for that identity in the first place.
Jessie followed up “Plum Bun” with another novel in 1931 called “The Chinaberry Tree,” and then, two years later, with her final novel, “Comedy. American Style”. “Comedy. American Style” looked at the issue of what Jessie called “color mania” in the Black community, which related to discrimination within the community based on one’s skin shade.
In 1929, at 47 years old, Jessie met and married an insurance broker named Herbert Harris. Following the wedding, Jessie and her husband moved from New York City to Montclair, New Jersey where they settled down and lived quietly until Herbert’s death in 1958. Following his passing, Jessie moved to Philadelphia to be closer to her family.
Jessie died on April 30, 1961 from heart disease. She was 79 years old.
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