Birthday: "Maturity is reached the day we don’t need to be lied to about anything."

Frank Garvin Yerby (1916-1991)

Novelist

Recipient, O. Henry Award, 1944

Frank Yerby was one of the most successful American novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, but since his death, his work has become almost entirely forgotten.

Born in Augusta, Georgia to a mixed-race couple, Yerby could pass for white but was legally black. He graduated from Paine College in 1937 and took his MA from Fisk University in 1938. He started a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, then taught briefly at Florida A&M and Southern University, schools he later denounced as “stifling” and “Uncle Tom factories.”

Fed up to his back teeth with the segregated South, he moved to Michigan and became a technician at Ford Motor Company. He moved on to New York, where he worked as an inspector in an aircraft plant.

Yerby’s early short stories reflected the “protest” fiction of Richard Wright and his contemporaries; an early published short story won him the O. Henry Award. Rejection of a novel exploring similar themes is suggested, by many scholars, as the reason for an abrupt change in Yerby’s style and focus. He moved to meticulously researched tales set in the antebellum South, always featuring white male protagonists working through personal issues in a general swirling storm of adventure and intrigue.

Though his work was set in a popular time and format, they were not the usual, Hollywoodized version of plantation life. There were no happy darkies; rapacious landowners, carpetbaggers, and arrivistes abound in his work.

He became known as “the king of the costume drama” and told The New York Times,

[his] destination was "the never-never land of the spirit, of imagination; and all the arrows point away from the here and now."

The downside was that, as the Civil Right and Black Power movements of the 1950s-1970s evolved, Yerby was increasingly faulted for pandering to white readers and the publishing establishment. It probably did not help that, in 1951, he moved to Spain in protest of American racism, and remained there for the next 36 years. Though a remarkably able writer, he never won the critical acclaim contemporaries like James Baldwin enjoyed.

At one time he argued, “the novelist hasn’t any right to inflict on the public his private views on politics, race, or religion.” He considered himself multiracial, claiming ancestry that looked “like a mini-United Nations.”

"You can call me a racist if you like, because I dislike the human race," he said during the interview. "But do not call me black. I have more Seminole than Negro blood in me anyway. But when have I ever been referred to as 'that American Indian author?' "

He enjoyed early success, publishing his first short story at seventeen. After his first novel, a racial protest work, found no publisher, he thought it better to make a living where the market was than starve on principle. His first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow (1946) was a classic Southern costume drama with white protagonists. It made him the first African-American author to have a million-copy bestseller- it sold over two million in three years- and- when 20th Century Fox bought it for an eye-popping $150,000-  also made him the first to have his work optioned for a movie.

Starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara, the 1947 film of Foxes won an Oscar nomination. For his part, Yerby thought it was “the worst movie of all times.”

Some readers felt cheated, too: The Los Angeles Times obituary noted,

The novel dealt with a philanderer in early 19th-Century New Orleans who seeks to advance himself by breaking up his marriage. Its portrayal of lust and ambition became a best-seller and a particular favorite of Southern white women who Yerby said later were appalled when they discovered he was not white.

Yerby’s market-driven career made him America’s most celebrated black writer at the same time he became among the least popular among African-Americans. It was 1969 before he published a novel with a back protagonist- Speak Now- and two years later he produced his masterpiece, Dahomean, the story of an African prince transported into slavery.

Unable to find a home in America, literally or figuratively, Yerby moved to fascist Spain in 1951. Money continued to pour in: he sold two more novels for movies in the 1950s and a television series later, and his 33 novels sold over sixty million copies, in seventeen languages, by his death. He was immensely popular in Europe, and especially in Germany. In 1981, People magazine wrote,

Frank Yerby cheerfully admits it: “I’ve written some very bad books.” For instance, he observes that his 1946 Southern-gothic blockbuster The Foxes of Harrow comprises “every romantic cliché in history.” So, in fact, do most of his 28 other historical romances, which explore exotic locales from tribal Africa to colonial America and feature roguish heroes, libidinous heroines, and subplots lovingly embellished with derring-do and duplicity, miscegenation and mayhem, sex and sadism. But his readers are nothing if not loyal: To date Yerby has sold 55 million hardcover and paperback copies in 17 languages, making him one of the best-selling writers in the world.

Yerby felt ill-used by critics:

“Too many of them are failed novelists who don’t know how to read,” Yerby says. “They should be licensed like doctors and lawyers.” His fellow black writers offer him little support. “They’ve gotten on me for not dealing with racial issues,” Yerby complains. “But that’s an artistic dead end. I’m glad to have escaped. There’s no hope for racial harmony in the U.S. and never was. America is just the world’s biggest banana republic. It does everything badly.”

Yerby has been an expatriate living in Madrid for 25 years. Now 64, he is something of a black Hemingway whose real battles are not with the bulls but with his past.

It was easy dismissing Yerby as a sellout. But as the late, lamented blog Book Slut put the counter-argument,

For the last forty years, defenders of Yerby have attempted to justify the fact that he wrote romance novels, suggesting that he dodged confrontations with racial issues in order to publish on his own terms. According to these readings, the value of Yerby's work arises mainly from his rejection of expectations imposed upon his generation of African-American writers. But a reading of The Foxes of Harrow presents an opportunity for rethinking Yerby's handling of racial themes, and suggests that we should reconsider the importance of his work among mid-century African-American writers like Wright, Hurston, and Ellison.

Yerby shunned publicity, preferring to race cars for fun and raise flowers at a villa outside Madrid. He even married his second wife, Blanquita, secretly; US gossip columnists only twigged to the story when he dedicated his next book to her.  In his last months, he kept his illness a secret, preferring to keep writing as long as he could. And, honoring his last wish, Yerby’s widow did not announce his death- on November 29, 1991, until five weeks later.