Frank Yerby
| Frank Yerby | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Frank Garvin Yerby September 5, 1916 Augusta, Georgia United States |
| Died | November 29, 1991 (aged 75) Madrid, Spain |
| Occupation | historical novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | African-American |
Frank Yerby (September 5, 1916 – November 29, 1991) was a popular American writer, best known for his 1946 historical novel The Foxes of Harrow, which was the first novel written by an African-American to become a best seller.
Frank Garvin Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916, the second of four children of Rufus Garvin Yerby (1886-1961) and Wilhelmina Ethel Yerby (née Smythe) (1888-1960). Rufus, a hotel doorman, was part African American, part Seminole; Wilhelmina ("Willie") was Scots-Irish. Yerby would later refer to himself as "a young man whose list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations." As a child, Yerby attended Augusta's Haines Institute, a private school for African Americans. In 1937, he graduated from Paine College with a B.A. in English, and earned his M.A. from Fisk University in 1938. In 1939, he began courses for his doctorate in education at the University of Chicago, but left school to teach.
Yerby was originally noted for writing romance novels set in the antebellum South. In mid-century, Yerby began writing a series of best-selling historical novels ranging from the Athens of Pericles to Europe in the Dark Ages. Yerby took considerable pains in research and often footnoted his historical works. In all, he wrote 33 novels. In 1946, he published The Foxes of Harrow, a southern historical romance, which became the first novel by an African-American to sell more than a million copies. In this work he faithfully reproduced many of the genre's most familiar features, with the notable exception of his representation of African-American characters, who bore little resemblance to the "happy darkies" that appeared in such well-known works as Gone With the Wind (1936). That same year he also became the first African-American to have a book purchased for screen adaptation by a Hollywood studio, when 20th Century Fox optioned Foxes. Ultimately, the book became a 1947 Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara.
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