PLUM BUN by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset was many things: a literary mentor, a prominent editor, and a trailblazing novelist. She began contributing essays to the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, less than a year before W. E. B. Du Bois offered her a job at its helm. From there, she shaped the Harlem Renaissance—both with her own writing and with the writing she supported.

Originally published in 1929, Plum Bun has deserved a reprint for decades. It has deserved to share a shelf with the voices Fauset herself discovered in the 1920s: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and others.