Jessie Redmon Fauset was an American editor, poet, essayist, novelist and educator whose work helped shape African-American literature of the 1920s. As literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine, from 1919 to 1926, she championed black writers, and she also co-edited The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine. Her novels, including Plum Bun, There Is Confusion and The Chinaberry Tree, follow black middle-class characters through questions of racial passing and prejudice. She also mentored Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay.
