Frank Yerby
Frank Yerby was born in 1916 in Augusta, Georgia. He earned his undergraduate degree from Paine College and a master’s in English from Fisk. He went to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. He didn’t finish, but he did pledge Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
He taught at several colleges before he quit. He said the atmosphere was “stifling” and called the schools “Uncle Tom factories.” So he left the classroom and took a factory job in Detroit, working as a technician at Ford.
In 1944, his first published short story ran in Harper’s and won an O. Henry Memorial Award. He kept writing short stories. Then he submitted a novel called This Is My Own, and it got rejected. One editor wrote back to tell him he could write. They just weren’t going to publish that book.
Short stories didn’t pay the bills so Frank took the feedback and did something most writers never do. He researched the book industry. He found that historical fiction was the best-selling genre in the country, and he pivoted. The result was The Foxes of Harrow.
His debut novel sold 500,000 copies in two months and passed a million copies before the end of its first year.
The book is set in Louisiana in the mid-1800s. The main character is Stephen Fox, an Irish gambler who becomes the owner of a large slave plantation. Black readers and critics attacked Frank for abandoning protest writing. But he didn’t abandon anything. He changed his strategy.
Inside that bestseller, Frank took apart the moonlight and magnolia myth, the idea that plantation owners were honorable, refined aristocrats. Stephen Fox builds his fortune on greed, gambling, and exploitation, which shows high society was built on theft and hypocrisy. The Black characters are rebellious, intelligent, and articulate. The book put the horrors of slavery on the page for millions of readers who thought they were picking up a romance.
Major book clubs picked it up. It sold in newsstands and drugstores. Frank and his publisher sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox, and the movie came out in 1947 starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara.
From 1946 to 1964, he published a novel a year. Nine of his first ten were New York Times bestsellers. He kept publishing until 1985. Thirty-three books in all, more than 55 million copies sold, in 82 countries and 23 languages.
In 1955, tired of American racism, he moved to Madrid. He mailed his finished manuscripts to New York, did his research in European libraries, and refused press tours.
Black intellectuals kept criticizing him for ignoring racial struggle. Frank’s position was that a writer’s job is to entertain, and he refused to write the tragic protest novels white publishers expected from Black authors.
Frank Yerby joined the ancestors in 1991 and was survived by his second wife and 4 children from his first marriage. He was 75.
