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Biography-Criticism
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an instrumental writer and literary editor during the Harlem Renaissance. Born on April 27, 1882 in Camden, New Jersey, she was the seventh child born to her parents Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset. Fauset attended the High School for Girls in Philadelphia. Despite the fact that she was the only black person in attendance at that school, she went on to graduate with honors in 1900.
 
Fauset first attempted to pursue her college education at Bryn Mawr College. However, officials there refused to accept her so she instead attended Cornell University. Her focus was on languages and she graduated in 1905. During this time she also was awarded the accomplishment of becoming the first black woman to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and the only black graduate to do so at Cornell before 1921.
 
Fauset completed college with a bachelor of arts from Cornell University, a master of arts in French at the University of Pennsylvania in 1929 and a certificate from Sorbonne, University of Paris. After graduating from college, Fauset went on to pursue a career as a teacher. She tried to seek employment within the Philadelphia school system but she was denied a position because of her race. She ended up moving to Washington D.C. where she successfully taught French at an all black school for 14 years.
 
The end of her teaching career in Washington marked the beginning of her career as a literary editor. She left her teaching job, in 1919, after being asked by W.E.B Du Bois to move to New York to work with him for The Crisis magazine. The Crisis magazine was a major publication of the Harlem Renaissance that was put forth by the NAACP. In her position as literary editor, she was able to discover and give rise to many black writers that would soon become very popular. One of those writers was Langston Hughes who proclaimed Fauset to be one of the three “mid wives” who helped to guide black artistic development.
 
In addition to literary editor, Fauset was also an essayist, poet, and accomplished novelist. She was best known as a writer of fiction, having had many of her short stories published in The Crisis. In the 1920s, she began to work on her first novel titled There Is Confusion. Published in 1924, There Is Confusion was a fictitious story that sought to set straight the depiction of black life and experiences. This novel was well received and it also ended up being issued in a second edition in 1928. Her second and what is considered to be her best work was the novel Plum Bun, published in 1929. This novel dealt with the issue of being of mixed race and passing for white. What makes this novel even more interesting and creative is the fact that the plot actually gets its structure from a nursery rhyme. Finally, Fauset published the novels The Chinaberry Tree, (1931) and Comedy: American Style, (1933). These novels didn’t do as well as the first two, but nevertheless were considered to be worthwhile. Having published four novels, Fauset was the most published novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.
 
Jessie Redmon Fauset died on April 30th, 1961, just three days after her 79th birthday.