New Books Network Interview: Victoria Christopher Murray

The Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century marked both a flowering of African-American culture and a recognition of abilities and interests that already existed. Names such as W. E. B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston came onto the scene during those years, although a few more decades passed before their contributions to US culture as a whole were fully appreciated. Even then, some Black writers and artists who played vital roles in the 1910s and 1920s did not receive the recognition they deserved. It is perhaps not coincidental that several of those neglected were women. In my latest New Books Network interview, Victoria Christopher Murray shines a well-earned spotlight on one such overlooked female author, Jessie Redmon Fauset.

As always, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray’s Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master’s from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children’s magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page.

Photograph of Jessie Redmon Fauset public domain via Wikimedia Commons.