The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel is freely available at several sites.

A.C. McClurg & Co., the publisher of The Quest of the Silver Fleece, presented a brief description, or blurb, of Du Bois's novel in its A Classified Catalogue of Selected Standard Books Suitable for a Public Library (1912). The entire note (on p.12) reads as follows:
 DU BOIS, W. E. B. The quest of the silver fleece..........net   1 35

     The author deals with the negro school, and modern cotton manipulation in cotton exchanges, and presents incidentally the best account of the life of educated and successful negroes in Washington yet given.

 Citation: A.C. McClurg & Co. A Classified Catalogue of Selected Standard Books Suitable for a Public Library Proportioned in Accordance with Approved Library Methods, Fourth Edition. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1912. [DuBois on p.12.]
Notes: The book title was not italicized and not placed in initial capital letters, with the exception of "The". The words "Negro" and "Negroes" were not capitalized in the original.

Line Drawing of Quest Protagonists. The front cover of The Crisis (v.2, n.6, October 1911) presented a line drawing that explicitly indicated that it was 'From the "Quest of the Silver Fleece"' but was not actually published in the book itself. It depicted the central protagonists Bles and Zora amidst a field of cotton, both partially entwined,with Zora's arm draped on Bles's shoulder. Both appeared to be holding cotton. The line drawing seems to be in the style of the illustrator of Quest, H.S. De Lay, but no attribution was provided.
 NOTE: On page 257 of the same issue of The Crisis is an illustration that was published in Quest on the page following page 50 (and was captioned in Quest as "They together, back in the swamp, shadowed by the foliage, began to fashion the wonderful garment.").

An anonymous notice published in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine (December 1911). The notice is presented here verbatim and in its entirety:
     "The Quest of the Silver Fleece," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, '90, announced by A. C. McClurg, describes the struggles of the negro [sic] who attempts to develop his personality."

 Citation: Anonymous. "'The Quest of the Silver Fleece,' by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois." Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 78 (December 1911): 382.

In the Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh we read the following short notice for Quest in the "Additions--March 1912" section, presented here verbatim and in its entirety:

 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt.D859q

    Quest of the silver fleece; a novel. McClurg.

     The "silver fleece" is the cotton of the South Hero and heroine are both negroes, [sic] but the story is more than a study of the race problem.

 Citation: Anonymous. "Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Quest of the Silver Fleece." Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 17:3 (March 1912): 152.
Note: The "D859q" is the library's call number for the book.

The Kindergarten-Primary Magazine published an anonymously written, brief review of Quest (September 1912). The full text of the review is presented below verbatim and in its entirety:

The Quest of the Silver Fleece. By W. E. B. DuBois. Cloth, 434 pages. Published by A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago. Price $1.50.

    The silver fleece is the cotton, and the beauty of the cotton fields in all the stages of growth is pictured with rare power by one who passionately loves them. Written by a cultivated, college-bred scholar of the colored race, the thoughtful reader is made still more thoughtful by an illuminating glimpse into the racial problem as viewed from the standpoint of the negro, a problem ever-present with his people. Viewed as a story alone it holds one to the end. There is much subtle character drawing. The New England teacher, true to her Puritan ideals through long weary years of isolation and struggle, will appeal to the kindergartner who so often must carry the missionary spirit into untried fields. We are let into the secrets of the cruel manipulation of the cotton market by the Northern financier, in a very powerful chapter; and the trial scene presents an interesting psychological study in its portrayal of the two leading men, each true to his own code of honor, tho [sic] it mean loss to himself; each unable to understand the others [sic] standpoint in a certain particular; each quite unaware of his own moral obliquity in the advantage he takes, the one in the great financial markets of the world, the other in the smaller local labor market. The book may hurt, in a measure our self-esteem; but it should increase our intelligent outlook upon the politics involved, the economics, the ethics, of a serious problem. There are evil tendencies, as there are noble possibilities, in the colored folk, as in every other people; they are distinctly human. The sooner we co-operate with them in their struggle toward a noble self-realization, the less of a problem we leave for posterity. Some years ago race-prejudice wreaked a terrible injustice upon a French Jew. The closing lines of Edwin Markham in his great Dreyfus poem read thus,

"Tis no avail to bargain, sneer and nod,
And shrug the shoulder in reply to God."

 Note 1 — Citation: Anonymous. "The Quest of the Silver Fleece. By W. E. B. DuBois." Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, 25:1 (September 1912): p.59.

 Note 2: "Negro" is not capitalized in the original text.

 Note 3: Edwin Markham's poem "Dreyfus" can be viewed online at Google Books here.

In "The Negro in American Fiction" (1916) Benjamin Brawley discussed both Black and White authors as regards their portrayals of African Americans in works of literature. Wrote Brawley:
"Professor DuBois's "The Quest of the Silver Fleece" contains at least one strong dramatic situation; but the author is a sociologist and essayist rather than a novelist." (p.450)

 Citation: Benjamin Brawley. "The Negro in American Fiction." The Dial, v.60 (May 11, 1916): 445-450.

George Edmund Haynes in The Trend of the Races (1922) praised Quest very highly:
 The "Quest of the Silver Fleece", and the prose poems in "Souls of Black Folk" and "Darkwater" will win for W. E. B. DuBois a place as a writer long after the controversies over the "race problem" are ended. (p.76)

 Citation: George Edmund Haynes. The Trend of the Races. NY: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1922.

William Stanley Braithwaite in his essay "The Negro in American Literature" (1925) surveys both the depiction of African Americans in U.S. fiction but also the creative works in multiple genres written by African American authors. In the following extended, verbatim quotation, Braithwaite lauds Du Bois—paying special attention to The Souls of Black Folk—and then briefly describes and praises Quest.
    Let me refer briefly to a type of literature in which there have been many pens, but a single mind. Dr. Du Bois is the most variously gifted writer which the race has produced. Poet, novelist, sociologist, historian and essayist, he has produced books in all these fields with the exception, I believe, of a formal book of poems, and has given to each the distinction of his clear and exact thinking, and of his sensitive imagination and passionate vision. The Souls of Black Folk was the book of an era; it was a painful book, a book of tortured dreams woven into the fabric of the sociologist's document. This book has more profoundly influenced the spiritual temper of the race than any other written in its generation. It is only through the intense, passionate idealism of such substance as makes The Souls of Black Folk such a quivering rhapsody of wrongs endured and hopes to be fulfilled that the poets of the race with compelling artistry can lift the Negro into the only full and complete nationalism he knows—that of the American democracy. No other book has more clearly revealed to the nation at large the true idealism and high aspiration of the American Negro.

    In this book, as well as in many of Dr. Du Bois's essays, it is often my personal feeling that I am witnessing the birth of a poet, phoenix-like, out of a scholar. Between The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, published four years ago, Dr. Du Bois has written a number of books, none more notable, in my opinion, than his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in which he made Cotton the great protagonist of fate in the lives of the Southern people, both white and black. I only know of one other such attempt and accomplishment in American fiction—that of Frank Norris —and I am somehow of the opinion that when the great epic novel of the South is written this book will prove to have been its forerunner.  (pp.40-41)

———————————–

 Citation: Braithwaite, W.S. 1925. "The Negro in American Literature." Pp.29-44 in Alain Locke (Ed.), The New Negro: An Interpretation (NY: Albert & Charles Boni, Inc.).

"America Before 1950: Black Writers' Views" (1969) by James A. Emanuel. In the article Emanuel analyzed various African American authors and their works. Regarding Quest, he wrote:
  "Du Bois's scholarly novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), brought a new factual political sophistication into the narration of racial struggle, for he explained how the cotton industry affected Washington politics, Northern industrialism, and Southern prejudice." (p.28)

 Citation: James A. Emanuel. "America Before 1950: Black Writers' Views." Negro Digest, 18:10 (August 1969): 26-34, 67-69.

"Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece" (1999) by Maurice Lee. He writes:
 . . . Du Bois is anchored by "wonderful fact," an apt description for his use of genre in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. On the one hand, he invokes the wonderful -- the power of love and human freedom. On the other, he is concerned with fact -- with the Realpolitik of power and difference that affected African Americans. Neither mode alone is sufficient, and so Du Bois deploys a type of twoness. With a realist's eye for social critique, he condemns Northern industry and Southern mythology. With a romancer's faith in possibility, he rejects social Darwinism's fatal universe and theories of scientific racism.

 Citation: Maurice Lee. "Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece." African American Review, 33:3 (Fall 1999): 389-400.

"Du Bois, W. E. B.: The Quest of the Silver Fleece" by Robert W. Williams is a profile of the novel summarizing its plot, significance, and critical reception (December 2009). The Literary Encyclopedia is an Internet-based reference work covering literarture, history, philosophy, and other intellectual topics. A yearly subscription is required to view more than an excerpt of the article.

The Calhoun School, a rural private school located in Lowndes County, Alabama, was established in 1892 by two White female instructors originally teaching at Hampton Institute, Mabel Dillingham and Charlotte Thorn. Acording to David Levering Lewis, the Calhoun School served as the exemplar for the fictional school headed by Susan Smith in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (see Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois, Vol.1 (1993): p.446 via Google Books). The school created an African American community of farmers wherein Blacks received a basic education, including industrial-style training. Farming techniques were taught and practiced at the school farm. Moreover, the school provided a way by which families could receive loans to purchase plots of land, thus assisting them on the road to eventual property ownership. The Rev. Pitt Dillingham became a principal at the school after the untimely death of his sister, Mabel Dillingham [see a brief Dillingham family genealogy]. Booker T. Washington supported the school (see his eulogy at the funeral of Ms. Dillingham in October 1894). In 1943 the Calhoun School became a public school under the supervision of the Lowndes County Board of Education.
    Du Bois considered the work of the Calhoun School to be of particular importance for African Americans in the rural South:
    My honest belief is that what has been done in Lowndes County under the Calhoun school and the sensible farseeing guardianship of John Lemon, Pitt Dillingham, and Charlotte Thorn, could be duplicated in every single black belt county of the south.

 Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. "The Economic Future of the Negro." Publications of the American Economic Association, 3rd Series, v.7 (1906): 219-242, at p.236 [Google Books].

    The following links point to online sources describing the goals and significance of the Calhoun School as well as recounting varied, often personal, experiences of the school: