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.