A graduate of Cornell University and the first African American woman admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, Jessie Fauset taught high school for many years, but in 1919 she left the classroom to become literary editor of The Crisis, a magazine put out by the NAACP. In that position she did much to encourage the black cultural flowering ultimately known as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Poet Langston Hughes claimed that she was, in fact, one of three key figures who "midwifed the . . . New Negro literature into being." Fauset was also a writer of modest distinction in her own right. Her finest work was Plum Bun, a novel published in 1929 that focused on the problem of racial identity and "passing" for white.

By the time Laura Waring made this portrait for the Harmon Foundation's pantheon of African American achievement in 1945, Fauset had long since retired from her literary involvements.