Fauset, Jessie Redmon (1882-1961), was an African American novelist and editor. Her novel Plum Bun (1929) is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement for change in African American literature and other arts during the 1920’s and early 1930’s.
The main characters in Plum Bun are two middle-class African American sisters from Philadelphia, Angela and Virginia Murray. Angela is light-skinned and decides to pass for white to escape the racism of her time. She moves to New York City. There, she has an unhappy love affair with an upper-class white man who spurns her when he learns she is Black. Virginia accepts her heritage and leads a positive life in Harlem.
In Plum Bun, Fauset explored issues that have become significant in Black women’s fiction. They include a Black woman’s experience passing for white, the abuse of women as sexual objects, the value of racial pride, and the importance of female bonding. Fauset also wrote three other novels, all on Black themes with African American women as the central characters. They are There Is Confusion (1924), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933).
Fauset was born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 with a degree in classical languages. Fauset taught in a Washington, D.C., high school from 1906 to 1919, when she earned a master’s degree in French at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1912, Fauset began contributing articles, poems, and stories to the magazine The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis, offered Fauset the position of the magazine’s literary editor. She held the post from 1919 to 1926. During that time, she encouraged the work of such noted Harlem Renaissance writers as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, George S. Schuyler, and Jean Toomer.
Fauset taught in a New York City high school from 1927 to 1944 and was a visiting professor at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) from 1949 to 1950. She had little involvement in literature during the later years of her life. Fauset died on April 30, 1961.
