Comedy: American Style by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Comedy: American Style is a tragedy. The title is the first irony. Fauset's 1933 novel follows Olivia Cary, a mother so consumed by the desire to pass as white that she destroys everyone around her — her daughter's future, her son's sense of worth, her family's coherence. Fauset was literary editor of The Crisis under W.E.B. Du Bois, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance's literary infrastructure, the editor who first published Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. This was her fourth and final novel. She wrote it from the inside of the world she was documenting — and she did not flinch.

"You don't mean she's willing to marry a white man?" (20)

"She was tired of her thoughts, tired of her memories, tired to death of her tiredness.... she was glad to be getting away from it all; glad not to have on her hands either the responsibility of choosing the clothes to take, of packing them, of selecting, refusing, triumphantly accepting a particular stateroom." (120)

"Finally his school-life was affording him endless joy. He was reading poetry now with relish and gusto... 'The Eve of Saint Agnes,' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' He did not care for the 'Ancient Mariner,' although rather taken with its simplicity and quaintness, nor was he greatly charmed with the lush deliberate beauty of Shelley and Gabriel Rossetti... But the 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality' left him speechless with awe and satisfaction." (156)

"'But I am glad... not to be leaving you, no, not that, never that. You're nice and I like you. Only I'm awfully glad to be going where I'm going.'" (170)

"'She's a beautiful woman.... And there are always men ready to help a beautiful woman...for reasons of their own.'" (172)

"'For years now she had thought that love must come to her... the love she especially sought, in the manner which she desired.... But it had eluded her... and she had been too proud, too busy, too absorbed in getting ahead, to see it.'" (195)

"'I want to tell you now a thousand times... I love you. So when I come in tired and sleepy and stupid you'll reach back in your memory and haul one of them out.'" (227)