Harlem Rhapsody

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of racism.

Murray chose to focus her novel on Jessie Redmon Fauset because little has been written about her in comparison to the most famous writers of her era. As literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset discovered many of the most famous writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes calls Fauset “the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance” (Huang, Pien, et al. “The Relationship at the Heart of the Harlem Renaissance.” NPR, 28 Feb. 2025). The Harlem Renaissance was a period of “championing Black artistic production as a way of attaining full rights and participation in American society” in the late 1910s and 1920s (Greene, Roland, et al. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 596). The Harlem Renaissance included not only writing but also music, especially jazz. Murray’s novel includes Fletcher Henderson and Mamie Smith and also mentions Louis Armstrong. She also argues, through the character of Jessie, that poetry is part of the music of the Harlem Renaissance.

Murray read every issue of The Crisis magazine that Fauset edited. The magazine was created by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 and continued publishing print issues until 2021. It included articles, reviews, stories, poems, illustrations, and photographs that gave more accurate insight into the lives of Black people than any other publication did at that time. It was an important source of news about lynchings and other forms of racist violence in addition to discussing Black culture and launching the careers of many authors. The Crisis was published by the NAACP, which Du Bois co-founded as well, and is often cited as the oldest magazine specifically created by and for Black people.

Fauset and Du Bois also edited The Brownies’ Book, a publication for Black children. It was published monthly for two years and then had to close because of financial issues. It was revived in 2023 as The New Brownies’ Book, which featured new works alongside excerpts from the original. Fauset published some of the authors who went on to become famous in The Brownies’ Book before she published them in The Crisis. The Brownies’ Book was a jumping-off point for authors such as Nella Larson and Pocahontas Foster.

Murray also includes rival magazines, such as Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, and The Liberator, co-edited by Claude McKay. Other important publications of the time that Murray discusses in her novel are The Book of American Negro Poetry, Bronze: A Book of Verse, and Harlem Shadows.