There Is Confusion (Modern Library Torchbearers)

Author: Fauset, Jessie Redmon

Brand: RANDOM HOUSE GROUP

Color: Yellow

Binding: paperback

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 11-02-2020

Details: Product Description
A rediscovered classic about how racism and sexism tests the spirit, ambition, and character of three children growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem, from the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP


With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins

Set in early-twentieth-century New York City,
There Is Confusion tells the story of three Black children: Joanna Marshall, a talented dancer willing to sacrifice everything for success; Maggie Ellersley, an extraordinarily beautiful girl determined to leave her working-class background behind; and Peter Bye, a clever would-be surgeon who is driven by his love for Joanna. 

As children, Maggie, Joanna, and Peter support one another’s dreams, but as young adults,romance threatens to upset the balance of their friendship. One afternoon, Joanna makes two irrevocable decisions—and sets off a chain of events that wreaks havoc with all of their lives. 

First published to immense critical acclaim in 1924, written with an Austen-like eye for social dynamics,
There Is Confusion is an unjustly forgotten classic that celebrates Black ambition, love, and the struggle for equality. 


The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
About the Author
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister. She attended Cornell University, where she studied Latin, Greek, German, and French, and became one of the first Black women elected to Phi Beta Kappa. According to some sources she studied at the Sorbonne before earning her M.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fauset began contributing to
The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in 1912. By 1919, she was its literary editor, becoming the first person to publish Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Bennett’s poetry as well as shaping the careers of Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Joanna’s first consciousness of the close understanding which existed between herself and her father dated back to a time when she was very young. Her mother, her brothers and her sister had gone to church, and Joanna, suffering from some slight childish complaint, had been left home. She had climbed upon her father’s knee demanding a story.

“What sort of story?” Joel Marshall asked, willing and anxious to please her, for she was his favorite child.

“Story ’bout somebody great, Daddy. Great like I’m going to be when I get to be a big girl.”

He stared at her amazed and adoring. She was like a little, living echo out of his own forgotten past. Joel Marshall, born a slave and the son of a slave in Richmond, Virginia, had felt as a little boy that same impulse to greatness.

“As a little tyke,” his mother used to tell her friends, “he was always pesterin’ me: ‘Mammy, I’ll be a great man some day, won’t I? Mammy, you’re gonna help me to be great?’

“But that was a long time ago, just a year or so after the war,” said Mammy, rocking complacently in her comfortable chair. “How wuz I to know he’d be a great caterer, feedin’ bank presidents and everything? Once you know they had him fix a banquet fur President Grant. Sent all the way to Richmond fur ’im. That’s howcome he settled yere in New York; yassuh, my son is sure a great man.”

But alas for poor Joel! His idea of greatness and his Mammy’s were totally at variance. The kind of greatness he had envisaged had been that which gets one before the public eye, which makes one a leader of causes, a “man among men.” He loved such phrases

EAN: 9780593134429

Package Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English