Jessie Redmon Fauset - Literary Editor at The Crisis

Literary Editor At The Crisis

Jessie Fauset’s time with the Crisis is considered the most prolific literary period of the magazine’s run. In July 1918, Fauset became a contributor to the Crisis, sending articles for the “Looking Glass” column from her home in Philadelphia. By the next July, W.E.B. Du Bois requested she move to New York in order to become the full time Literary Editor. By October, Fauset was installed in the Crisis office, where she quickly took over most organizational duties. As Literary Editor, Fauset fostered the careers of many of the most famous authors of the Harlem Renaissance, including Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes. In fact, Fauset was the first person to publish Hughes. A few of his early poems appeared in The Brownies’ Book, The Crisis’s children’s magazine edited by Fauset. In his memoir, The Big Sea, Hughes calls Fauset the “midwife” of the Harlem Renaissance, though the truth of this moniker has only recently been fully appreciated by critics.

Beyond nurturing the careers of other African American modernist writers, Fauset was also a prolific contributor to both The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book. During her time with The Crisis, Fauset contributed poems and short stories, as well as a novelette, translations from the French of writings by black authors from Europe and Africa, and a multitude of editorials. Fauset also published accounts of her extensive travels. Notably, Fauset included five essays detailing her six month visit to France and Algeria in 1925 and 1926 with Laura Wheeler Waring, though the most well-known of her travel writing must be her editorial detailing her visits to the Pan-African Congresses in 1921 and 1923.

After eight years as Literary Editor, conflicts between Fauset and Du Bois began to take their toll. In February 1927, Fauset left her position. She is instead listed as “Contributing Editor,” though this designation remains on the masthead only one month. From 1927 to 1944, she taught French at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, though she continued to publish.