* 27.4.1882 Snow Hill, NJ - † 30.4.1961 Philadelphia

Occupation: Novelist, Editor

Gehuwd met Gerbert Harrus (x 1929 - † 1958)

Opleiding:  University: Cornell University (1905)
Loopbaan: Onderwijzeres: M Street High School, Washington, DC, University: AM French, University of Pennsylvania; DeWitt Clinton High School, Bronx, NY

Boeken samenstelster The Crisis Literary Editor (1919-26)
Schrijfster van de navolgende boeken: There Is Confusion (1924, novel); Plum Bun (1928, novel); Chinaberry Tree (1931, novel); Comedy, American Style (1933, novel)

Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in 1882 in Fredericksville, New Jersey into an affluent family. Her father, Redmon Fauset, was a minister whose family bailed from Philadelphia. Her mother, Anna, died when Jessie Fauset was a child.

Fauset attended Cornell University from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1905. She began her professional life as a teacher, taking a teaching post in French and Latin in Washington DC, in 1906. In 1919 she received a Master's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania and honed her skills at the Sorbonne before coming to New York City.

Between 1919 and 1926, at the height of that explosion of creative activity centred in New York which was known as the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP.s publication the Crisis, under the direction of W.E.B. DuBois. In addition to writing regular articles for the magazine, Fauset was responsible for fostering such notable literary greats as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer.

In the early 1920s, she also edited The Brownies Books an NAACP publication geared toward African American children. Upon leaving her post at the Crisis, Fauset returned to teaching and taught French in the New York City schools for much of the rest of her life.

Jessie Fauset wrote all four of her novels in the remarkably prolific years between 1924 and 1931. All of these works explore race through characters and situations in which the division between black and white seems to blur. In Plum Bun, arguably Fauset’s strongest work, the blurring occurs as the novel’s protagonist, Angela, Angela Murray, a very light skinned black woman, alienates herself from her remaining as woman, a senates of her remaining

Jessie Fauset, the most published novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, was living in retirement in Montclair, New Jersey, when Laura Wheeler Waring painted her portrait for the Harmon collection. Her four books, There Is Confusion (1924), Plumb Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933), exposed Americans to a great group of Negroes of education and substance who are living lives of quiet interests and pursuits.

The daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, Fauset grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Cornell University in 1905. She received a master's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania and went on to study at the Sorbonne. For fourteen years she taught French and Latin at what became Dunbar High School in the District of Columbia.

From 1919 to 1926, Fauset was the indispensable associate of W.E.B. DuBois in the publication of the NAACP magazine "The Crisis." Persuading DuBois that creative writing could be a source of racial uplift.

Fauset cultivated the talents of young poets and novelists. Langston Hughes considered her to be one of three persons who midwife the so-called New Negro literature into being.

Laura Wheeler Waring and Fauset were old friends when she painted Fauset's portrait for the Harmon Foundation. Both native Philadelphians, Waring and Fauset became closely associated in Paris in 1914. It may have been their long friendship that influenced the Hannon Foundation to include Fauset in its portrait collection, as her celebrity , which had reached its apex during the Harlem Renaissance, had significantly declined by the mi-1940s.

Cover Plum Bun

Relative, her sister, in order to pursue a life of passing as white in New York City. Though the book is subtitled "A Novel Without a Moral." Faucet’s message at the end couldn't be clearer: by passing and effectively separating herself from her family and community, Angela has become alienated from herself. The issue of skin colour is raised quite differently in the ironically titled Comedy American Style; here Olivia,. another light-skinned protagonist, has become so obsessed with the desire for whiteness, marrying a light-skinned man in order to bear lighter-skinned children, and rejecting the one among them, Oliver, who turns out dark, that she ends up destroying her family and herself Faucet’s remaining novels, The Chinaberry Tree and There is Confusion, both hinge upon the complications which arise in a culture in which procreative relationships between the races are common but are not legally sanctioned. These novels question the validity of the basis on which the colour line is maintained. In addition to her novels and the essays she wrote for the Crisis, Fauset also wrote and published poetry .

Jessie Fauset has often been criticized for portraying her almost exclusively upper-middle class characters as exemp1ars of "what the race is capable of doing" (Christian 41). Her detractors argue that her emphasis on blacks of so-called "genteel" culture as standard-bearers for the race silences the lives and contributions of others who are not so economically advantaged. Others assert that a close examination of the novels themselves reveals "a thematic and ironic complexity, a stylistic subtlety that few critics have seen" (McDowell x), which makes her seeming adherence to bourgeois "conventions seem less the badge of a hidebound traditionalist with prudish mid-Victorian sensibilities and more that of a burgeoning progressive."

Works by the Author: o There is Confusion (1924) o Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) o The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) o Comedy Americ8n Style (1933)

LITT.: o Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP , 1992. o Bachelor, Lea and A. Walton Litz, Eds. Modem Ameri(an Women Writers. New York: Scribner, 1991. o Christian. Barbara. Black Women Novelists. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1980. o McDowe11, Deborah E.

Introduction: A Question of Power or the Rear Guard Faces Front." Plum Bun. Boston: Pandora P, 1985. ix-xxiv. o McLendon,. Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Colour in the Fim on of Jesse Fauset and Nella Larsen. Cbarlottesville: UP of Virginia. 1995. o Sylvander. Carolyn Wedin. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer. Troy. NY: Whitston Pub. Co., 1981. o Wall, Cheryl A., Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.