Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) was an African American editor, poet, and novelist. Born in Camden County, New Jersey, Fauset lost her mother and father at a young age and grew up in poverty alongside six siblings, three half-siblings, and three stepsiblings. Despite her troubled youth, she graduated as valedictorian from the Philadelphia High School for Girls before enrolling at Cornell University, where she studied classical languages and became one of the first black woman accepted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. After receiving a master's degree in French at the University of Pennsylvania, she began teaching at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. In 1919, she became the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, where she worked under founding editor W. E. B. Du Bois to elevate some of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to her own writing, The Crisis under Fauset's editorship published Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Between 1924 and 1933, she published four novels exploring themes of racial discrimination and passing, including There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1928). She earned a reputation as a writer who sought to capture the lives of working professionals from the black community, thereby providing a realistic portrait of her culture.
