Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) was one of the most important literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. As literary editor of The Crisis , the magazine of the NAACP, she discovered and published the early work of Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. Langston Hughes called her the "midwife" of the Harlem Renaissance, and it is no exaggeration.
But Fauset was far more than an editor. She was a novelist of remarkable depth and ambition whose four novels explored race, class, gender, and identity in ways that anticipated the themes of later African American fiction by decades.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in Frederickville (now Lawnside), New Jersey, the seventh child in a prominent African American family. Her father, Redmon Fauset, was an African Methodist Episcopal minister who emphasized education and racial pride.