A minor, though pivotal, figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Redmon Fauset was the author of four novels and numerous short stories, essays, poems, and articles written between 1910 and 1933. From 1919 to 1926 she was the literary editor of the Crisis magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After 1926 she became a contributing editor. In 1920 and 1921 she edited and wrote The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine that was a project of W. E. B. Du Bois. In "discovering" and encouraging major black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, both formally and informally, her work is unsurpassed: she promoted the work of George Schuyler, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. In her own writing, particularly in her essays and novels, Fauset demonstrates an awareness of the far-reaching implications of the black struggle in the United States and an understanding of the unique situation of the...