The Editor of The Crisis

by bam

Jessie Redmon Fauset ran the literary pages of The Crisis from October 1919 to April 1926. She took the first poem Langston Hughes published outside his high school magazine, ran Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer and Arna Bontemps, and kept the rooms where those writers met each other. Hughes later named her one of three people who midwifed the New Negro literature into being. The movement is remembered by name; she is remembered as staff. This course is about why, and it is about editorial work rather than about a life: what an acquiring editor actually does, why none of it leaves a byline, and how credit for a movement travels to whoever signed the poems. It is built on the magazine itself, read issue by issue, because the masthead settles a tenure that every secondary account rounds off, and it separates writers she is documented to have acquired from writers who merely appeared while she was there, because those are different claims and the record does not settle both. Her four novels are the control case: she did have a byline, and is still barely read, so this course refuses the tidy story that erasure explains everything. Where the evidence is genuinely argued, it teaches the argument and names who holds which position.