Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida to Edward Fells and Cornelia Murphy. She was a sculptor from an early age. Her principal paid her a dollar a day in her senior year of high school to teach students modeling. This started her commitment to teaching as well as to art. Her first commission was for a bust of W. E. B. Du Bois for the Harlem Library in 1923. This outstanding sculpture ignited her career as a sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance but Savage decided to retire from the world of art in 1945 and spent the rest of her life teaching art to children and writing children's stories.