Published in 1999 (first published 1929)
408 pages
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist.
Fauset was born in Fredericksville, an all-black hamlet in Camden County, New Jersey, also known as Free Haven (now incorporated into the borough of Lawnside, New Jersey). She was the daughter of Anna “Annie” Seamon and Redmon Fauset, a Presbyterian minister. Her mother died when she was still a young girl. Her father remarried Bella Huff (a white woman), and they had three children, including civil rights activist and folklorist Arthur Fauset (1899–1983).
Fauset attended Philadelphia High School for girls, and graduated as the only African American in her class. After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, and is believed to be the second black woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She later received her M.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fauset came to the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in 1912. From 1919 to 1926 she served as the literary editor of The Crisis under W. E. B. Du Bois. Eventually 58 of her 77 published works first appeared in the journal’s pages. She is the author of four novels, There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933). She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.
Fauset worked as a schoolteacher for many years and retired from teaching in 1944. She died in 1961 from heart failure.
What is this book about?
Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.
