Frank Yerby(1916-1991)

Frank Garvin Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5th, 1916. His father, Rufus Garvin Yerby, was a hotel doorman of black, white, and native American ancestry. His mother, the former Wilhelmina Ethel Smythe, was a teacher of white and more distant black ancestry. He attended the Haines Institute, a private elementary and secondary school for black students in Augusta, and received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Paine College. He received a Master of Arts in English from Fisk University in 1938, yet it would be close to seven years before his short story, "Health Card", winner of the O. Henry Memorial Award for best first published short story in 1944, started him on his career.

In 1946 his first novel, "The Foxes of Harrow", was an immediate success. So much so that Frank Yerby became the first African American novelist to reach the Best Seller Lists in the United States. The following year, after 20th Century Fox bought the screen rights to that novel, Mr. Yerby became the first African American novelist to have a movie adapted by a major Hollywood studio.

His novels are mostly action-packed period pieces, usually featuring a strong white hero in conflict with his times. His stories usually played out in colorful language and include characters of all ethnic backgrounds, with an emphasis on black, or "Negro" characters. He chose this course after every publisher rejected his first novel, an action adventure with a strong "Negro" lead. After that experience, he abandoned protest literature in favor of historical fiction with white protagonists.

Frank Yerby rose to fame as a writer of popular fiction awash with a distinctive "old south" flavor. During his career, he wrote thirty-three novels and sold more than seventy million hardback and paperback books worldwide.

As a Black author, though, Mr. Yerby was criticized for not paying more attention to the plight of "his race." Though he said that writers should entertain and not preach to their readers, it is generally accepted that his novels exposed the hideous double standards of the "old south", including lacerating portraits of Klansmen, white slave owners and their like. The depth of racial discrimination in the United States caused Yerby to leave his native land and live a self-imposed exile in Nice, France from 1952 - 1955 and then in Madrid, Spain from 1955 until his death November 29th 1991 in Madrid, Spain.