Comedy: American Style: American Style

Chronology

chronology 1882 Jessie “Redmona” Fauset is born in Fredericksville, Camden County, Snow Hill Center Township, New Jersey, on April 27 to Reverend Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset. She is their seventh child. 1900 Graduates from Philadelphia High School for Girls. In 1881, Philadelphia ends school desegregation; however, Fauset is the only black in her high school class. 1903 Fauset’s father dies on January 1. She begins a correspondence with the intellectual and race leader W.E.B. Du Bois. 1905 Graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University. 1906–1919 Teaches French and Latin at the prestigious M Street High School in Washington, D.C. The school was renamed Dunbar High in 1916. 1912 Begins writing the “What to Read” section for The Crisis and publishes “Rondeau,” a poem, and early short stories like “Emmy.” 1918 Enrolls in M.A. program in French at the University of Pennsylvania , graduating in 1919. 1919 During the “Red Summer” of 1919, African American soldiers returning home from World War I and other black citizens are subjected to epidemic levels of racial violence. Race riots and lynchings peak throughout the South, the North, and the Midwest. The Harlem Renaissance is underway. Fauset moves to New York City and becomes literary editor of The Crisis. As editor, she promotes many of the major writers of the period, including Countee Cullen, Marita Bonner, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, and Claude McKay. She “discovers” Langston Hughes when she publishes “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1921. She is a prolific contributor to the magazine , publishing in nearly every genre. Her reviews of books published outside the United States expand the diasporic and transatlantic awareness reflected in the pages of The Crisis. Of particular interest is her 1920 review of Martinique-born writer René Maran’s prize-winning novel Batouala, although she would xi later decline to translate the book herself, telling Joel Spingarn, “I know my own milieu too well.” 1920 Publishes the Brownies Book, a magazine devoted to African American children, with W.E.B. Du Bois. The twenty-four issues published from January to December were primarily overseen, written, and solicited by Fauset. The Brownies Book includes one of Nella Larsen’s first published writings, “Three Scandinavian Games,” along with biographical pieces, poems, songs, profiles, and short stories. 1921 Fauset attends the 2nd Pan-African Congress in Brussels, London, and Paris as a delegate of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She publishes a report in The Crisis on the proceedings entitled “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress.” The Glasgow Herald and other world newspapers remarked on Fauset’s London speeches. 1922 T. S. Stribling publishes Birthright. The novel features a somewhat sympathetic black protagonist, a naïve Harvard graduate who returns to a tragic fate in the South. Fauset’s response, “let us who are better qualified to present that truth than any white writer, try to do so,” has been read as a call to arms for New Negro fiction writers. 1924 There Is Confusion is published by Boni and Liveright. Charles Johnson considers the Civic Club dinner thrown in honor of the publication of Fauset’s first novel a “coming out” party for writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The guest list included a Who’s Who of the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset later tells her brother Arthur that “the dinner . . . wasn’t for me.” 1924–1925 During her third trip to Paris, Fauset studies and earns a certificate from the Sorbonne and the Alliance Française. She also takes her first trip to Africa during this period. 1925 Alain Locke publishes the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation . It includes an essay by Fauset on drama entitled “The Gift of Laughter.” 1925–1926 Fauset publishes several essays that chronicle her visits to France and Algeria. They include “Yarrow Revisited,” “This Way to the Flea Market,” and “Dark Algiers The White, Parts I & II.” xii • chronology 1926 Relationship with Du Bois sours and results in Fauset’s resignation from The Crisis. Du Bois announces her departure in a brief note in The Crisis in May. Though she publishes occasionally in The Crisis for a few years, the magazine is redesigned and the emphasis shifts. 1927 Fauset returns to teaching in the New York public schools, teaching French at DeWitt Clinton High School until 1944. 1928 Publishes Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral with Frederick A. Stokes Co. in New York. Stokes...