Autobiographical Elements
The novel’s plot and characters include many autobiographical elements. When Fauset’s mother died, her father remarried a white woman. In Fauset’s actual family, as in the novel, some members of the family could roam at will throughout Philadelphia, while others were prohibited from public places such as hospitals, restaurants, and stores by widely accepted Jim Crow policies. Other autobiographical elements include growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, being the only African-American student in a white school, and discovering Philadelphia’s racist policies for hiring public school teachers (a black teacher could not teach white students). Fauset, like her main characters, moved to Harlem during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance (in 1919) and heard W. E. B. du Bois (in the novel he is named Van Meier) speak.
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