Jessie Fauset Publishes 'Plum Bun'—A Novel About Racial Passing

In 1929, Jessie Fauset published her second novel 'Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral,' exploring the experiences of a light-skinned Black woman who passes as white in New York City. The novel interweaves themes of race, gender, and the costs of assimilation, while depicting a broader range of Black women's experience than most fiction of the era. Fauset, as literary editor of The Crisis, had simultaneously been nurturing virtually every major Harlem Renaissance writer.