Bio of jessie redmon fauset

Writer, editor, educator

The Formative Years

The Harlem Years

Author of Four Novels

“I Have Scribbled Poetry”

From “Rear Guard” to Pioneer

Selected writings

Sources

Jessie Fauset, author of four novels, was a pivotal figure in the literary and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York City during the 1920s.

As early as 1912 she began contributing poems and short stories to The Crisis magazine, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) cofounded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In 1919 she became the literary editor of The Crisis, a position she held until 1926.

During her tenure as editor, Fauset encouraged the literary careers of such major Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen.

Her influence and inspiration were so profound that Hughes, in his autobiography The Big Sea, credited her, along with