Jessie Redmon Fauset began her second novel, Plum Bun, during the summer of 1924, just a few months after Boni & Liveright had published her first, There Is Confusion. On October 8 she wrote to Langston Hughes from Paris: “I like the stuff of my next novel—I have a good title for it too—but I am troubled as I have never been before with form. Somehow I’ve never thought much about form except for verse. But now I think I am over zealous—I write and destroy and smoke and get nervous.” By the next fall she had finished a draft of the novel, titled “Market.” She shared this version with W.E.B. Du Bois, whose unpublished response was dated September 10, 1925, and submitted her manuscript to Boni & Liveright. On October 21, 1925, she wrote to Carl Van Vechten in the hope that he might help her to find a new publisher for “Market”: “Mr. Liveright has rejected the book and it is now being read by the Viking Press. I know that you are acquainted with members of that firm and if you can help me in this case I should certainly appreciate it.” But Viking, too, decided not to publish the book. It would be three years before the novel finally appeared in print, under the title Plum Bun. No manuscript versions of the novel are known to be extant, and the extent to which Fauset may have revised “Market” in the interim is uncertain. Her agent, Brandt & Brandt, finally placed the novel with the London firm of Elkin Mathews & Marrot, which published it in October 1928. Early the next year the novel was released in the United States by the New York firm of Frederick A. Stokes, in the form of the British sheets with the Stokes imprint on the title page. Stokes subsequently had the text reset, and by April 1929 the publisher was able to call its current printing the “third”; but this American setting, which repeats the British spellings, introduced new errors into the text and contains no changes that can be considered authorial. Plum Bun did not appear in print again during Fauset’s lifetime. The text in this e-Book follows the 1928 Elkin Mathews & Marrot edition.
This e-Book presents the text of the edition chosen for inclusion here but does not attempt to reproduce every feature of its typographic design. The text is reprinted without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number of the print edition: 452.32, fimly; 466.7, profession.; 475.28, argue;; 484.19, “Look; 484.20, means!”; 485.27–28, Angela trim; 488.23, Hotel She; 506.11, whch; 510.6, indicted; 511.37, tabulating; 514.12, on your; 516.9, he did; 518.21, filled; 519.25, her car; 525.1, happiness would; 530.37–38, again again; 531.19, she saw she words; 535.14, Angela; 563.3, conventions,; 575.23, married; 578.36, ‘Well’?”; 586.29, herself “God!”; 590.15, so-beit; 608.36, glaxy; 614.11–12, bewildered; she; 616.20, Mr Cross; 617.23, glibly;; 618.26, ago Back; 620.32, revolver “I’ve; 623.31, swamp And; 631.12, understand There’s; 631.28, memory! Oh; 640.4, her.’; 641.30, years’; 642.11–12, sunny, vocabulary; 644.8, herself,; 651.17, week’s; 653.22–23, presumbably; 653.35, years; 654.12, friendship her; 664.15, is has; 662.7, herself ashamed; 674.23, nothing with; 675.40, Let’s; 675.40, you; 683.31, Movies.
Notes
In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the print edition; the line count includes titles and headings but not blank lines. No note is made for material found in standard desk-reference works. For additional information and references to other studies, Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); George Hutchinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Jacquelyn Y. McLendon, The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing, 1981); and Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
433.4–7 “To Market . . . is done.”] Traditional English nursery rhyme.
445.34 “bad hair”] Hard-to-straighten, closely curled hair.
455.35 Lycidas] Elegy by John Milton (1608–1674), first published in 1638.
463.20 and siller hae] And silver have: see “The Siller Croun” (c. 1788) by Susanna Blamire (1747–1794), the “muse of Cumberland”; the poem was later set to music (c. 1800) by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).
548.4–15 two poems . . . again.’] See John S. Hart’s Class Book of Poetry, Consisting of Selections from Distinguished English and American Poets, first published in 1845. The first poem is from “I’ll Never Love Thee More,” an English song often attributed to and perhaps adapted by James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650); the second is from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1762 revision, in an anthology titled The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78).
569.1–5 a verse from a poet . . . fool!”] See “The Suppliant,” from the book Bronze (1922), by Georgia Douglas Johnson (c. 1880–1966).
571.18–19 Raquel Meller] Meller (1888–1962), a Spanish singer and actress, performed in New York to considerable acclaim beginning in 1926.
576.37–39 “It is not courage . . . great,—”] See “To Lucasta on Going to the War—for the Fourth Time,” from Fairies and Fusiliers (1918), by Robert Graves (1895–1985), as misquoted in the opening editorial of The Crisis, March 1919.
648.3 Tony Hardcastle] Tony Lumpkin, son of Mrs. Hardcastle in the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773), by Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774).
648.25 the Duse] Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), Italian actress.
655.5–14 “Not going . . . because she’s coloured?”] Fauset’s account of Rachel Powell’s career closely parallels the story of Augusta Savage (1892–1962), an African American sculpture student and a recent graduate of Cooper Union who, in a widely publicized incident in 1923, was denied the scholarship she had won to the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts because of her race.
656.18 “Who killed Dr. Cronlin?”] See Who Killed Dr. Cronin; or, At Work on the Great Chicago Mystery (1889), by Old Cap Lee, number 341 in the New York Detective Library series, published in Chicago by Frank Tousey. “Old Cap Lee” was a house name used for many of the firm’s detective and mystery stories.
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