summary 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,