From the Jim Crow section of Augusta, Georgia, to voluntary expatriation in Europe, from automobile plant technician during World War II to recipient of honorary doctorate degrees, from social protest writer in the 1940s to American King of the Costume Romance, and from Chicago Works Progress Administration (WPA) writers’ colony to international celeb novelist translated into twenty-three languages, Frank Garvin Yerby did indeed make history both as an African American and American writer, becoming one of the most commercially successful and popular writers of the twentieth century. Seminal to each of these Yerby journeys were his work with the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago and his becoming acquainted with WPA writers and artists, including Richard Wright, Willard Motley, Margaret Walker, William Attaway, and Arna Bontemps, all of whom would eventually make their mark in American literature and help define the developing Black Chicago Renaissance. For Yerby, the Chicago WPA experience was an opportune apprenticeship, and as he told Current Biography in 1946, the brief period he spent with other Chicago Renaissance writers was the best literary training he had received.1
One of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Yerby was the first African American to write a best-selling novel and have a book purchased by a Hollywood studio for a film adaptation. During his prolific career as a writer, he published thirty-three novels between 1946 and 1985, almost one a year. Many of his novels were bestsellers and book club selections, and sales of his novels during his career totaled more than 62,000,000 copies hardback and paperback. Three of his early novels, The Foxes of Harrow, The Golden Hawk, and The Saracen Blade, were made into movies, and a fourth, Bride of Liberty, was adapted as a one-hour television show. According to Russell B. Nye in The Unembarrassed Muse, Yerby ranks as one of the five most popular writers of the second half of the twentieth century.2 Despite these unprecedented achievements, however, Yerby never enjoyed the critical acclaim of many of his contemporaries of the Chicago Renaissance.
Frank Garvin Yerby, the second child and the first of three sons of Rufus Garvin and Wilhelmina (Smythe) Yerby, was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916. A well-established and influential black family in the Augusta community, the Yerbys lived in a two-story frame house on the corners of Eighth and Hall Streets, just outside the heart of Augusta’s largest predominantly black residential area, “The Terry.” Yerby’s birth home, located originally at 1112 Eighth Street, has now been moved to the campus of Paine College, where it is being restored as a Yerby historic site. Rufus Yerby, the writer’s father, worked as an itinerant hotel doorman in Miami and Detroit and traveled periodically to and from Augusta. Consequently, Yerby, his older sister, Ellena, and his two younger brothers, Paul and Alonza, were raised primarily by their mother, Wilhelmina, a former teacher, and by three aunts, Louise, Fannie, and Emily Symthe, who also were teachers.
As a young man, Yerby developed two strong propensities that occupied most of his time. At an early age, he became a voracious reader, and he also enjoyed tinkering with mechanical and electronic devices. Two interesting anecdotes about his early formative years are indicative of his boyhood penchant toward literacy. Sometimes when given money for lunch at school, he would save it until he accumulated enough to purchase a particular book he wanted, and Yerby frequently fabricated stories that he related to his aunts. Once, when he was reprimanded by his Aunt Emily for inventing stories, his Aunt Fannie remarked prophetically, “Oh, let him alone! He might be a writer some day.”3
The Yerby children attended Haines Institute, then a private black school in Augusta with both elementary and high school grades, and now a public secondary school renamed Lucy Laney High School. Yerby quickly acquired a reputation among his classmates for being an avid reader and a studious youth. In an interview, Rebecca Zealey, one of his teachers at Haines, revealed that Yerby preferred reading to taking advantage of the school recess periods and sometimes had to be forced to go outside with the other students.4 After graduation from Haines Institute, Yerby attended Paine College, a black undergraduate college in Augusta, where he majored in English and minored in foreign languages. While still an undergraduate, he transferred to the City College of New York; however, illness forced him to return to school in Augusta. At Paine, Yerby was active in the English Club and the Dramatics Club and was on the staff of the school newspaper, The Paineite. Pursuing his inclination toward the arts, he also assisted in the production of several plays and performed the lead role in Hamlet. Yerby in retrospect, however, remembered his high school and college days as unexciting, for as he said to Harvey Breit in 1951: “I was a fairly dreadful kind of student. Nonathletic, very studious, took scholastic honors, what the boys today would call a grind.”5
It was during his early “dreadful school years” that Yerby developed an interest in writing. As early as his high school years, he showed promise as a writer and was encouraged by his teachers; and as a college student, he wrote short stories, poetry, and editorials for the school paper. Some of his first poems were published in “little magazines” such as Challenge, Shard, and Arts Quarterly; and in 1937, “Love Story,” the first of nine short stories he published, appeared in The Paineite. He also cowrote the Paine College Alma Mater; and in collaboration with one faculty member, Miss Emma C. W. Gray, he wrote “March On,” a historical pageant that celebrated the college’s fiftieth anniversary, while also recounting the history of Black Americans and of Paine College. More significant encouragement for the aspiring writer came, however, from a well-known black writer. “The late James Weldon Johnson,” Yerby said in Current Biography, “approved some verses of mine shown to him by my sister, then a student at Fisk University.”6
With this type of encouragement, Yerby continued to develop his writing skills, periodically publishing poetry and short stories. After graduation from Paine in 1937, he headed to graduate school at Fisk University, and one of the ambitions he expressed as he prepared to leave Paine was the desire to walk down the aisle of his Alma Mater in doctoral regalia. At this too he almost succeeded. In 1977, Paine College invited Yerby to serve as its Spring Commencement speaker, and at the commencement, his Alma Mater conferred on him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. That same year, Yerby also became an honorary citizen of the State of Tennessee by Governor’s Proclamation.
Yerby continued his development as a writer at Fisk, publishing two stories, “A Date with Vera” and “Young Man Afraid,” in the Fisk Herald in 1937. The former story focuses on race relations in the South and North, while the latter is introspective, exploring a youth’s fear of death after an automobile accident. At Fisk, Yerby majored in English, was active in the Little Theater group, and wrote and produced several plays, one of which toured several states on the Little Theater Circuit. Additionally, he wrote his master’s thesis, “The Little Theatre in the Negro College,” under the direction of noted scholar Lorenzo D. Turner. After receiving his Master of Arts degree in Dramatic Arts in 1938 at the age of twenty-one, Yerby enrolled in the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate degree in English.
The American South in general and the Augusta community in particular greatly influenced some of Yerby’s early convictions, shaping him in at least two distinctly different ways. Typical then of the racial climate of most towns of its size in the Deep South, Yerby’s hometown Augusta was controlled politically by the Cracker Party, a local reactionary political organization in power; and as in other Southern communities, segregation and social and economic oppression of blacks were the order of the day. Favorably, Yerby spent the first twenty years of his life in Augusta and gained a firsthand knowledge of Southern mores and customs—the subject he eventually chose for much of his fiction. While living in the South shaped the realistic perspective from which he views the traditions and culture of the South, Yerby was, on the other hand, adversely affected by the South’s racism and segregation. He was fortunate enough to have avoided working in the Augusta community, unlike many Paine College students did, thus escaping some of the harsher realities of racial discrimination then prevalent in Augusta.
Yerby did not, however, totally escape the indignities of black life in the Jim Crow South. Occasionally, he received affronting stares from whites when he and his lighter complexioned sister Ellena were together; and as he told this author in a letter,7 the police in several Southern states and even in the state of New York harassed him when they mistakenly thought his first wife, Flora Helen Claire, was white. Indeed, the first twenty years of Yerby’s life in the South may well have been as he describes them in a letter to the author: “I lived (existed is a better word, for I dwelt spiritually an alien and a stranger, in a totally foreign land) in Augusta, from 1916 to 1936.”8 Yerby eventually migrated to the North to escape the harsh realities of Southern life; and in the same letter, he indicates his attitude toward the South: “I was fed to the backeye teeth with Augusta, and the South, and believed (poor young fool that I was!) that the North would be better.”9 Subsequently, Yerby’s attitude about life in the South became a powerful motivation in his literary decision to chronicle the inglorious legends of the “Old South.”
Although he migrated to Chicago in 1938 to continue his education, Yerby could not have chosen a more propitious time to arrive in the “Windy City.” As the famed Harlem Renaissance was winding down, Michael Flug observes, a new cultural flowering was erupting on the South Side of Chicago, more commonly known as Bronzeville. Fueled by the Great Migration and the Great Depression that followed, Flug continues, the new “Chicago Renaissance”—the term was coined decades later—produced startling developments in literature, art, music, social science, and journalism.10 Among the many emerging African American literary talents that helped shape the 1930s and 1940s Chicago Renaissance were Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Marita Bonner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, Theodore Ward, Fenton Johnson, and John H. Johnson. “What they did not dream,” Arna Bontemps observed, “was that a second awakening, less gaudy but closer to realities, was already in prospect.”11 In Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941–1943, Maren Stange identifies several overlapping groups that nurtured and supported the Chicago Renaissance; and included among these groups were the South Side Writers Project, variously led by Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, and the Illinois Writers’ Project, which included the celebrated Negro in Illinois Project directed by Bontemps and employing Wright, Katherine Dunham, and others.12 As part of the “Negro in Illinois Project,” Yerby worked for a while with a group of writers supervised by Dunham.
During his stint with the Chicago Renaissance writers, Yerby also wrote and published his fourth short story “The Thunder of God.” Published in The New Anvil in 1939, “The Thunder of God” is set in Yerby’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia, and depicts black life and social conditions of the period. The story incorporates Augusta’s great flood of 1939 as a backdrop, and narrated by a young man enrolled at Haines Institute, it describes the scene of torrent rain and a rising river threatening to break the levee and flood the entire city. Two white policemen have corralled young men from Haines Institute to help control the levee, and the police force the Haines students and other black men at gunpoint to work the levee, repairing it wherever it breaks. While they prevent destruction of white neighborhoods, the men are forced to watch their own neighborhoods being flooded and destroyed. Only the divine intervention of a loud clap of thunder and accompanying lightning extricates the men from this tense situation. Lightning strikes the levee, killing some of the men and leaving the white boss who held the men at gunpoint hanging onto the broken levee and screaming for help. The other men make no attempt to save the white boss, and as the river swiftly carries him away, they leave the levee, walking though the flooded streets of their town.
Yerby was with the Chicago WPA, however, for only nine months. Financial problems forced him to discontinue his education and leave Chicago in search of a teaching position, but his early departure may also have resulted in part, as Arna Bontemps suggested, from his being overly conscious of the subtle racism to which WPAers were occasionally subjected. Yerby’s discontinuance of his education in Chicago may also, however, have been providential. Second-guessing his fate years later, he said in retrospect: “Had I gotten the degree, I’d probably still be stuck in some small school teaching.”13
Yerby’s departure from Chicago in 1939 took him back to the South. On June 12, 1939, he accepted a teaching position in the Department of English at Florida A&M University, and from 1939 to 1941, he worked as an English professor, one year in Tallahassee, Florida, and a subsequent year at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Additionally, pursuing his interest in black college theater developed during his undergraduate and graduate school experiences, Yerby also published “Problems Confronting the Little Theater in the Negro College” in the Quarterly Journal of Florida A & M University, and “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Little Theater in the Negro College” in the Southern University Bulletin. While he was teaching at Florida A&M University, Yerby met Flora Helen Claire Williams, and after he relocated to Louisiana the next year, the two were married on March 1, 1941. At the end of the year, Yerby left his teaching position and with his wife moved to New York. In New York, however, he experienced difficulty securing a job and moved several months later to Detroit, where he found work as a laboratory technician in the Ford Motor Company’s Dearborn, Michigan, plant. Working in Michigan from 1942 through 1944, Yerby again found time to be creative and renewed his lagging interest in writing, working on a serious novel and several short stories, all of which were influenced by his experiences among Chicago Renaissance writers.
In June, 1944, the Yerbys and their three children, Jacques Loring, Nikki Ethlyn, and Faune Ellena, moved to Long Island, New York, as Yerby began work at Ranger (Fairchild) Aircraft in Jamaica, New York. In the Long Island community where Yerby lived, he again encountered racism. The first few months his family lived in the Valley Stream community were entirely peaceful; but his neighbors, who offered information and assistance, apparently did not know that the light-skinned Yerbys were the only blacks in the neighborhood. Several months later, the quietude was disrupted when a black friend began visiting the Yerbys, leading to the Valley Stream neighbors’ discovery of the racial heritage of the Yerbys. Immediately, Yerby and his family became outcasts in the community. Some neighbors threatened them, ostracized them, and offered to buy their house at triple its value. However, in 1946 when Yerby published his first novel, which he had completed while continuing to work at the aircraft factory, the accompanying publicity caused a change of heart in the community. The Yerbys were showered with apologies, and after the writer deposited $150,000 in a local bank some months later, the Yerbys became the community’s favorite citizens. Despite protestations from his Valley Stream neighbors, Yerby chose to move to Jackson Heights, Queens, where in 1950 the family was expanded by the birth of Jan Keith, Yerby’s second son.
Although he began writing as early as age seventeen, Yerby actually began his professional career as a writer in the 1940s. From 1944 to 1946, while living and working in Dearborn, Michigan, and New York, he published five of his most popular and frequently anthologized short stories; and he wrote a social protest novel that he submitted to a Redbook literary contest. A protest story about a Northern black steel mill worker turned professional boxer, the novel explored discrimination and injustices against blacks in the North. Redbook editors rejected Yerby’s novel but not without encouragement. In a letter to this author, Yerby said that Redbook’s Muriel Fuller wrote: “This is a lousy novel, but you sure can write! Send me something else.”14 The “something else” was an early story by Yerby entitled “Health Card”; but deciding that it was not Redbook’s kind of material, Fuller sent “Health Card” to Harper’s magazine, where it was published in 1944, and became Yerby’s first nationally publicized short story, eventually winning the O. Henry Memorial Award for the best short story of the year. “Health Card,” like Yerby’s protest novel written in the Richard Wright tradition of social protest, is a narrative about the injustices visited upon a black couple by the military police. In “Health Card,” the military police harass Johnny Green and his wife because they automatically assume that Green’s wife is a prostitute and demand to see her health card. In addition to providing Yerby his first national recognition, “Health Card” also brought Yerby invitations from other publishers.
Like “Health Card,” Yerby’s other published short stories focus on the mistreatment of blacks as they seek to negotiate racially hostile environments. “White Magnolias,” published in Phylon in 1944, explores the incongruities between the myths and realities of the customs of the Old South, but in addition to its import as a social protest story, it actually prefigures Yerby’s historical novels. Racial conflict arises in “White Magnolias” when a Southern white girl, Beth Thomas, invites black Fisk graduate Hannah Summers to afternoon tea. Having met previously at an interracial conference in the North, Hannah and Beth have initiated a friendship, which is forbidden by Southern social conventions. “Roads Going Down” and “The Homecoming” were published in the Summer 1945 and Spring 1946 issues of Common Ground, respectively, and both stories depict racial and social circumscription of black life in the South. In “Roads Going Down,” similar in theme and incident to Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Robert is forced to leave home after accidentally intruding on nude whites who are swimming. “Homecoming,” like “Health Card,” explores the racial indignities that a black soldier suffers. When Sergeant Willie Green returns home after fighting in World War II, he is expected to resubmit to the oppressive racial conventions of the South, an expectation he finds unacceptable. In “The Homecoming,” Green says: “I done fought and been most killed and now I’m a man. Can’t be a boy no more. Nobody’s boy.”15
In 1946, Yerby’s last published short story, “My Brother Went to College,” appeared in Tomorrow. “My Brother Went to College” depicts the lives of two brothers who took different paths, one a quest to find complete freedom and the other a quest for materialistic success. The narrator of the story, Mark Johnson, has spent the past ten years wandering across the country in search of an elusive freedom, and his brother, Matthew Johnson, has achieved his goal of becoming a successful, reputable physician. Happily reunited, the brothers reexamine their paths in life. Although he realizes the severe restrictions that middle-class life places on his brother Matthew, Mark is impressed with the luxuries of Matthew’s middle-class life and eventually gravitates toward his brother’s path to success. Contrary to popular opinion, however, “My Brother Went to College” was not the last social protest story Yerby wrote; he continued to write protest stories until the midfifties, although they remain unpublished. Yerby’s identity as a popular writer, his publishers, his expanding literary interests, and perhaps even his earlier antiprotest stance—all seem to have conspired to keep him from actually publishing more protest stories.
The formative years of Yerby’s development as a writer, including his WPA and Chicago Renaissance days, undeniably shaped his perspective. Like most African American writers of his era in America, Frank Yerby began his career writing protest stories, and like other writers, he illustrates in his stories the imposition of social and racial conventions on the lives of Black Americans and the limited responses available to them. His characters are alienated socially, economically, and politically from mainstream American life, cumulatively emphasizing their marginality. While the South as subject is as important in most of his short stories as it would become in his costume novels, his stories are more overtly racial and are written from the perspective of an embittered Black American. In fact, along with contemporaries such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, John Henrik Clark, and Ralph Ellison, Yerby contributed to a significant transition in the development of short stories written by African American writers. First, in the late thirties and early forties, African American writers collectively eliminated pathos from black protest stories and introduced new themes and insights; and second, in addition to The Crisis and Opportunity, which served as the major proving grounds for black writers, these writers found acceptance for their stories in some mainstream publications. Although Yerby had previously published in “little magazines” as a teenager, it is significant that most of his racial protest stories were published in the forties, a period in American letters when mainstream publications generally became more liberal in their acceptance of stories by black writers.
In fact, it was social protest fiction that actually prompted Yerby’s entrée into the world of the new vogue of historical romance popularized in the thirties. After his first attempt to publish a protest novel failed, Yerby decided he could best employ his talents as a writer in another arena of fiction; and deserting the ranks of black protest writers, he turned to historical fiction. When he talked with George Joel of Dial Press, the only publisher who had shown any interest in his protest novel, Yerby convinced Joel to let him try writing a historical novel. On the basis of twenty-seven pages Yerby wrote one night after working twelve hours in a Long Island airplane plant, Joel gave him a book advance of $250. The result was, of course, the popular, widely read historical novel The Foxes of Harrow. Thus began Yerby’s long and profitable relationship with Dial Press. Explaining his transition to popular fiction in “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel” in Harper’s in 1959, Yerby commented: “The idea dawned on me that to continue to follow the route I had mapped out for myself was roughly analogous to shouting one’s head off in Mammoth Cave.”16 Though his novels are set in historical periods and based on historical data, Yerby prefers to call them costume novels, and in the Harper’s article, he defines the costume novel as a genre of light, pleasant fiction intended merely to entertain. Notwithstanding Yerby’s entertainment declaration, his novels are intentionally written both to entertain and instruct.
In 1946 with the publication of his first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, Yerby made an abrupt transition from protest to popular fiction writer, prompting many of his contemporaries to question his motives. With the success of “Health Card,” they reasoned, why did Yerby abandon protest fiction? Initially, Yerby responded that he was not equipped to write protest fiction; however, his real motivations no doubt lay somewhere between the economics of publishing and his desire to succeed as a writer. Despite the misgivings of some about his venture into popular fiction, the reception of The Foxes of Harrow brought Yerby immediate success never before equaled by an African American writer; and the popularity of the book reached unprecedented heights for a novel written by an African American. Within two months, The Foxes of Harrow sold over 500,000 copies, and by the end of 1946, its sales had exceeded one million copies. Additionally, the novel was reprinted in condensed form in Negro Digest, Omnibook, and Liberty. Twentieth Century Fox purchased the screen rights for the novel and sought internationally known actors to portray the roles. Though Yerby did not particularly like the film version of his novel, The Foxes of Harrow became his passport to national prominence, to the “fast lane” in American popular fiction and to unparalleled literary success, however jaded. Additionally, The Foxes of Harrow is historically important because it established a commercially successful formula for Yerby’s novels and set the stage for his reception in the United States.
Covering the historical period from 1825–65, The Foxes of Harrow relates the story of Stephen Fox, an Irish immigrant and gambler who rises from poverty to wealth in New Orleans. After marrying into an aristocratic Creole family, Fox sets out to become a wealthy man. Between 1825 and 1865, he succeeds in becoming the owner of two huge plantations and amasses a fortune from gambling, conniving, working his slaves, and selling cotton. Fox, however, is an outcast who gains recognition in aristocratic New Orleans society but remains on the margins of that society, because he neither shares its beliefs nor conforms to the traditions of the South. In fact, Fox espouses political views that reflect a national perspective, not the regional perspective of the South; and in actuality, Fox becomes the prototype for subsequent Yerby protagonists.
Like many writers of first novels in the popular fiction genre, Yerby establishes an identifiable fiction formula in The Foxes of Harrow, one he replicates variously but consistently in subsequent novels. Amid the trappings and conventions of the Southern historical romance, Yerby’s first novel introduces a fictional pattern that generally includes 1) a protagonist who is alienated from society by misfortunes of birth or personal convictions, 2) a villainous antagonist, 3) a loyal companion or friend who understands and aids the protagonist, 4) several beautiful women who are attracted to the protagonist, 5) one or more oppressed minority groups—blacks, poor whites, slaves, serfs, etc., and 6) a significant historical focus—an important historical event or issue. Cementing the ingredients of Yerby’s success formula are an adventurous protagonist, exteriorized conflict, and literary sex. In The Foxes of Harrow, as indeed in many of his subsequent novels, Yerby portrays characters who resemble the common person, even as their bizarre exploits, fascinating sex lives, heroic struggles, and efforts to gain respect and make a name for themselves exact the suspension of the reader’s disbelief.
Critical reactions to The Foxes of Harrow and Yerby as a new author were generally favorable. When the sales of the novel skyrocketed in 1946, Yerby emerged overnight as a successful American writer. Immediately, many black intellectuals and writers concluded that Yerby, because of his success in popular fiction, possessed the potential for championing the cause of racial justice to the masses of the American public. They pointed to his talent and lauded his achievement as a black pioneer in the arena of popular fiction, but they were cautious. In the Chicago Sun Book Week, Arna Bontemps described Yerby’s achievement as a significant first but concluded that Yerby was actually stifling his talent by restricting his writing to popular fiction.17 Similarly, in Phylon in 1948, Alain Locke praised Yerby’s ability to free himself of the conventional confinement to racial themes,18 but like other black intellectuals, he hoped that Yerby would turn his attention to social issues. Thus, while not actually satisfied with Yerby’s choice of subject matter in The Foxes of Harrow, most black intellectuals and writers were generous in their reviews of the novel; at least they reserved their judgment.
White critics’ reviews of The Foxes of Harrow were more mixed but also generally favorable. In the New York Herald Tribune, for example, Hartnett Kane said: “This first novel indicates that Mr. Yerby has talent, a way with words. He needs, primarily, restraint.”19 Some reviewers concluded, however, that Yerby’s first novel amassed all of the stock characters and situations found in Southern historical romance novels, including the picaresque adventure, fragile but beautiful women, gambling and dueling, and the idyllic romance of the Southern plantation. Another critic in the New Yorker said: “Mr. Yerby has packed everything in—passion, politics, Creole society, sex, the clashes of the races, and war—but he never captures the faintest flutter of the breath of life.”20 Although some reviewers criticized The Foxes of Harrow as mediocre fiction, most were optimistic and lauded Yerby’s trailblazing performance as a black author, suggesting that it was soon to pass judgment on him.
Shortly after the publication of The Foxes of Harrow, Yerby announced that he was working on a second novel about Reconstruction in the South, and black and white intellectuals and critics alike awaited the publication of his second major literary effort. Written initially under the title “Ignoble Victory” but published as The Vixens (1947), Yerby’s second novel was a sequel to The Foxes of Harrow and tilled the same historical materials Yerby used in his first novel. Set during the years 1866–74, The Vixens focuses on Reconstruction politics in the South. Laird Fournois, son of a Creole planter, returns to New Orleans after fighting with the Union Army during the Civil War. Typical of Yerby protagonists, he enjoys acceptance in New Orleans society but remains an outcast. At the end of the novel, he rejects the South and goes to the North in search of a better life. The Vixens enjoyed a reception similar to that of The Foxes of Harrow. While it too made the bestseller list, the major significance of this novel for white reviewers was Yerby’s continued success in popular fiction. “What gives The Vixens special interest,” one reviewer said in a 1947 Time article, “is the fact that its author is the first Negro to make an unqualified success in the slick-writing field.”21 For black intellectuals, however, it was still too soon to judge Yerby. Though The Vixens followed the fiction pattern established in The Foxes of Harrow, they still harbored other expectations for the young, black successful author who had become, temporarily, a heroic symbol. For some, Yerby’s second novel had an even greater significance. Touting the significance of Yerby’s achievement, Hugh Gloster asserted in The Crisis that Yerby’s success demonstrated the black writer’s ability to “shake himself free of the shackles of race and to use the treasure trove of American experience….”22
The real test of Yerby’s significance as a symbol depended, however, on the publication of subsequent novels. Like other popular fiction writers who break into print, Yerby continued to adhere to his proven fictional blueprint established in The Foxes of Harrow, and reviews of his subsequent novels primarily emphasized the extent to which he adapted and manipulated the conventions of popular fiction. In the New York Times, one reviewer of The Golden Hawk (1948) said: “Certainly, Mr Yerby’s roaring prose belongs in a cartoon balloon, rather than between the covers of a full-priced novel.”23 Published in 1949, Pride’s Castle had a similar reception, and a Chicago Sun reviewer concluded that Yerby’s fifth novel, Floodtide (1950), showed little artistry.24 Although most magazine and newspaper reviewers routinely conceded that Yerby would probably continue to be successful and praised the black writer who could perform consistently in popular fiction, the aura of success surrounding Yerby was already losing its luster. Reviewers showed signs of becoming weary of Yerby’s costume formula and found little social relevance in his writing.
For black intellectuals, however, the heroic symbolism associated with Yerby’s achievement in popular fiction died much sooner. Though black intellectuals had hoped that Yerby, once established, would produce fiction that commented on contemporary social issues, Yerby steadfastly maintained his apolitical stance, refusing to embrace racial ideology or lend the prestige of his name or stature to racial causes. Yerby’s refusal to embrace racial ideology in his writing was unacceptable, and black intellectuals soon discarded the early heroic symbolism associated with his career. The comments of noted scholar Darwin T. Turner in a 1968 Massachusetts Review article appropriately describe the eclipse of the Yerby’s symbolic image: “Yerby did not prove effective as a symbol. He refused to plead for the race; he abandoned America without shrieking that bigotry exiled him from home; he earned a fortune writing books, and spent his time racing sportscars and lolling on beaches. So corpulent an achiever of the American dream can never personify the Negro intellectual, for the charm of the symbol is its aura of failure.”25
Published in 1951, a pivotal time in the development of Yerby’s career, A Woman Called Fancy is his sixth novel and his first with a female as the central character. Set in Yerby’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia, the novel covers the period from 1880 to 1894 and traces the life of Fancy Williamson, a beautiful woman from the hills of South Carolina who rises from poverty to prominence among aristocrats in Augusta. Like other Yerby protagonists, Fancy is an outcast, and Yerby devotes most of the novel to her rise in society. In his portrayal of Fancy, however, he emphasizes pointedly the ignoble origins of most Southern aristocrats. Not only does Fancy symbolize the accepted ideals of southerners; she in fact possesses nobler qualities than the southerners with whom she aspires to identify. Significantly, the year following his publication of A Woman Called Fancy, Yerby concluded that he had firmly established himself as a productive writer, and he quietly left America for France.
Unlike some black expatriates who decried American racism upon their departure, Yerby created no fanfare; however, his voluntary exile should not have been a surprise. A year earlier in A Woman Called Fancy, he had already declared his feelings about living in America. A sympathetic white character in the novel states:
I have to admit that blacks and whites can’t really live together. Not now, not ever. A Negro is just too damned physically, visibly different from a white man. Notice I said physically. I’ve known black boys who were in the first rank intellectually, which makes life damned miserable for them, the poor bastards, … What do you think it does to a bright boy to know it would cost him his life if he ever reared up on his haunches and acted like a man? Being bought and sold like mules did something to them. And even after that was over, the system we worked out to bolster up our uncertain vanities kept up the dirty work. It’s like Dred was saying: you don’t ever call a black man, “Mister.” Up to forty-five, he’s a “boy”; and after that he’s “Uncle.” The ones you know, you call by their first name—no matter how slightly you know ’em. The women are Mary Jane while they’re young, and after that they’re “Mammy” or “Antie.” We carry the thing even to such extremes of pure damned pettiness. We put them in places like the Terry and keep them there. We deny them anything like comfort. Heck, we’ve got it fixed so they don’t even get enough to eat. Then, when they rear up and act like the beasts we’ve made of them, we lynch them with a barbaric savagery that would disgrace a Sioux.26
It seems clear that Yerby considered himself one of those intelligent blacks; thus his expatriation. Though his quiet abandoning of the United States was directly related to its racial situation, Yerby resolved politically to ignore the issue of race altogether. Understanding the pettiness of American racism, he decided that prejudice based on the color of one’s skin is totally irrational; and in his 1969 Ebony interview with Hoyt Fuller, he stated his unwillingness to tolerate racism:
To put it as an oversimplification, I just don’t have time to waste on such nonsensical questions as casing a joint, or this or that restaurant to find out whether I will go in there and sit for three hours before some stupid ass of a waitress comes to spill a glass of water down my neck. I just don’t have time. It’s ridiculous. I should, if I were a combative, courageous-type militant who would put himself at the front of The Movement and go out and get himself shot in the belly a couple of times to advance things. So, I’m a coward. Let’s face it.27
Like other African American expatriates—Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin—Yerby left the United States to escape the psychological burden of racism and find refuge from racism in a foreign land, a goal he later concluded was impossible. Yerby’s exile from the United States was, too, a logical extension of his refusal to make race the central focus of his fiction. Unlike other African American expatriates, he was not prepared to commit his fiction to racial causes, and in a 1968 Detroit News and Times interview, he admitted his compromise:
If I’d stayed here, I would have been forced by emotional pressures to write about race, to write propaganda. I was arrested once for walking down the street with my sister; her skin is lighter than mine. I was unwilling to put up with a million annoyances here. I wanted to be able to write without thinking about race or politics or religion. I wanted to be able to write without rage.28
After leaving the United States, Yerby and his family settled in France, where he continued to write and develop his hobbies, including deep sea diving, sports car racing, and tinkering with electronic devices. Living in Nice on the Riviera, the Yerbys traveled extensively in Europe, while their children attended school in Switzerland. Traveling also afforded Yerby opportunities to gather historical data for future novels. During this period, however, he began having marital problems, and his wife and children returned to the States. In July 1956, his wife Flora Claire Helen filed for divorce in Mobile, Alabama, charging that Yerby had abandoned her in February 1955. The divorce was finalized in 1956.
While separated from his wife in 1955, Yerby met the woman who eventually became his second wife. During one of his visits to Madrid to see a friend in April 1955, Yerby met Blanquita Calle-Perez, a secretary employed at an American military corporation in Spain. Although born in Spain, Blanquita had spent her childhood in France, where she learned French before she completely mastered her native language. Several months after she met Yerby, she resigned her job to go to Italy to work, but Yerby became desperately ill and had to be hospitalized. Showing her devotion to him, she scarcely left his side until he recovered. They were married a year later on July 27, 1956, in Mexico City and honeymooned in Acapulco. Subsequently, Blanquita Calle-Perez became her husband’s secretary, translator, researcher, and general manager.
Following his marriage to Blanquita in 1956, Yerby returned to the United States with his new bride. Unaccustomed to the racial climate in America, his wife was extremely disturbed by the open hostility and curiosity white Americans displayed toward them. Yerby, however, was less perturbed by the inquisitiveness of Americans. Recalling their visit to the United States thirteen years later, he explained his views to Hoyt Fuller in the 1966 Ebony article: “Why do I have to have such things as to walk down the street with my wife and have somebody bump into a lamp post looking at us? Nonsense. I don’t have to put up with this. Why? One of the inalienable rights is that of the pursuit of happiness, and as of now, well, I’ve never been particularly happy in the States. So, I will probably visit the States with increasing frequency from now on, but to live there, I don’t think so….”29
Thus, Yerby’s attitude toward living in the United States had not changed. Though he visited the United States on a number of other occasions, he concluded that he would never return to live permanently in his country. After 1956, Frank and Blanquita Yerby lived only in Madrid, Spain, where they owned a house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Although their marriage produced no children, it was a very satisfying union according to Yerby.
Although the sales of Yerby’s novels did not indicate it, serious critical attention to Yerby’s fiction was already waning by the midfifties. Black intellectuals and writers had accepted the fact that Yerby would remain oblivious to contemporary social issues, and they devoted little attention to his writings. White reviewers, on the other hand, could not so easily dispose of Yerby, for he continued to produce best-selling novels. However differently assessed by reviewers, Yerby’s literary productivity exemplified the makings of a legend in the publishing industry, especially for an African American writer. In general, therefore, reviewers continued to track Yerby’s successive best-sellers and expertly analyzed his magic formula in such novels as A Woman Called Fancy (1951), The Saracen Blade (1952), Bride of Liberty (1954), and The Treasure of Pleasant Valley (1955). Sometimes they criticized Yerby’s failure to depart from his well-established fiction formula, finding little redeeming value in his novels; other times they labeled him a pulpster writing only for the money. Of the novels Yerby published in the last half of the fifties, Fairoaks (1957) received more critical acclaim than Captain Rebel (1956), The Serpent and the Staff (1958), or Jarrett’s Jade (1959). In the Chicago Tribune (August 25, 1957), William Yates called Fairoaks “Yerby’s most ambitious novel, his best by far….”30 Yet in leading newspapers and magazines, especially the New York Times, there was a noticeable decrease in the import, regularity, and length of reviews of Yerby’s novels.
Though Yerby had indicated an interest in writing more serious fiction as early as 1949, it was not until the sixties that he became noticeably concerned about the critical reception of his novels. Perhaps it was his own doubts about his place in the literary canon, his concern for his literary reputation, his increased artistic consciousness or all three combined, but in the sixties, Yerby demonstrated greater concern about the quality of his novels. The precipitous decline in his reputation as a popular novelist in the sixties also concerned his publishers. While his publishers were more interested in the sales of his novels, Yerby was no longer satisfied just to write novels. In a letter to his editors, he not only expressed displeasure with Dial Press’ editorial policies but also with the promotion and critical reception of his novels. His suspicions about the decline in the reception of his novels were indeed well-founded. After routine reviews of The Garfield Honor (1961) and Griffin’s Way (1962), the New York Times generally omitted reviews of his works until the publication of Judas, My Brother in 1968. Thus, the lack of serious critical consideration of Yerby’s novels in the late fifties and sixties is directly related to his recurrent use of his fiction formula and less significant novels.
In addition to less significant novels, however, one of the more persistent veins of critical opinion about Yerby’s fiction, especially among African Americans, was that he provided little or no interpretation of black life. A closer examination of his novels, however, reveals evidence to the contrary. Although Yerby purposefully avoided writing overtly about contemporary racial issues in his fiction during the first two decades of his career, he did not completely omit commentary on race. A substantial number of Yerby’s novels focus on historical periods before, during, and after the Civil War, and there are numerous images of blacks in the historical contexts of these novels, i.e., slaves, house servants, field workers, stablemen, breeders, slave children, and freedmen. Additionally, there are negative images of blacks that have historical significance, including servile, cringing slaves and slaves betraying their fellow slaves. In the panorama of images of blacks in Yerby’s fiction, however, it is not difficult to distinguish positive black images and history-bound images, positive or negative; and any careful evaluation of the images of blacks in Yerby’s fiction reveals more positive black images than critics have acknowledged. In fact, in his survey of American best-sellers written between 1900–1960, Donald Baker cites Yerby as one of only a few novelists who provide positive images of blacks.31
In The Foxes of Harrow, for example, La Belle Sauvauge is a rebellious slave, but Yerby chooses to portray her as a dignified and noble character, one who refuses to submit to the inferior role of the slave. Depicted as a paragon of virtue in The Foxes of Harrow, Inchcliff becomes a respected leader of his people during Reconstruction in the sequel The Vixens. In Griffin’s Way, there is further evidence of the progressive development in Yerby’s depiction of black characters. The most important black character in this novel is Dr. Bruce Randolph, an idealistic Harvard graduate who comes to the South to educate his people and eventually becomes a dedicated black leader. Positive and socially relevant images of blacks in Benton’s Row are evident as Yerby chronicles four generations of the white Benton family from 1842–92; using the literary technique of parallel characters, Yerby depicts positive images of black characters juxtaposed to each of the white male successors of the Benton family. Additionally, black physician Mose Johnson is the literary double for Duncan Childers, the protagonist and white physician in The Serpent and the Staff. In fact, most of Yerby’s novels of the South incorporate a secondary plot that usually depicts positive images of blacks, often in juxtaposition or in stark contrast to white characters.
Yerby’s growing concern with his reputation in the 1960s also spawned his interest in writing about contemporary issues. Though he did not participate, Yerby followed the Civil Rights Movement closely, and the turbulent sixties affected him personally. Consequently, the sixties were the impetus for what Yerby calls one of his best novels. In 1963, he wrote “The Tents of Shem,” a Civil Rights novel about a black family that integrates an all-white neighborhood. When his publishers rejected “The Tents of Shem,” he revised the novel and submitted it again in 1969; however, it is still unpublished. Neither Yerby nor his publishers ever explained why “The Tents of Shem” was not published. It is quite probable, however, that Yerby’s editors decided that the novel lacked the popular appeal of his previous novels and that it would damage his noncontroversial image. Despite the fate of “The Tents of Shem,” Yerby’s newfound willingness to demonstrate race consciousness in his writing subsequently influenced his writing of two of his most important novels, Speak Now (1969) and The Dahomean (1971).
Motivated by the amelioration of racial conditions in the United States during the sixties, Yerby concluded that the climate for the reception of novels about race had improved; and in Speak Now and The Dahomean, he abandons his apolitical stance on race, focusing on an African American and an African protagonist, respectively. As indications of Yerby’s increased willingness to demonstrate his racial consciousness, Speak Now and The Dahomean present different aspects of black history, many of which Yerby had actually presented in previous novels. Reviewers of Speak Now were quick to point out that Yerby deserted the historical romance genre, although it is not Yerby’s first contemporary novel; but some critics found Yerby’s contemporary novel a welcomed departure from the historical romance. One New York Times (Nov. 30, 1969) reviewer, noting Yerby’s treatment of his first black protagonist, said: “Harry’s peppery convictions are welcomed seasoning for the saintly role he plays in the novel. I hope we have not seen the last of him.”32
A restatement of some of the racial themes addressed in “The Tents of Shem,” Speak Now is a contemporary novel about Harry Forbes, a black musician who has lived alternatively in Europe and the United States since age thirteen. Seeking refuge from racism, he has resigned himself to the invisible role of the black jazz musician in Paris, France. Then Forbes meets Kathy Nichols, a white woman bigot from the American South, and the remainder of the novel explores the vicissitudes of racism and interracial relations between the two. In Paris, Forbes avoids racial frustrations by acquiescing to the role that Frenchmen expect of him as a black musician; however, his affair with Kathy forces him to confront the reality of his blackness again. He vents his frustrations by vengefully tormenting Kathy, but when he falls in love with her, he struggles to separate his bigotry and his genuine feelings for her. Though an alien in exile, Forbes cannot escape his racial identity or the American psychology of race.
Yerby’s best novel, The Dahomean, is the story of Nyasanu (Hwesu), second son of the village Chief Gbenu, who succeeds his father as Chief of the Alladah. After marrying a beautiful Dahomean woman, he goes to war and distinguishes himself as a warrior. Following the deaths of his father who is fatally injured in the war and his wife who dies during childbirth, he becomes the Chief of the Alladah people, inheriting his father’s wives and children; but Nyasanu struggles to maintain rule over dissenting factions of his province. After he is betrayed by a jealous stepbrother and a vengeful wife, he is sold into slavery. The perfect platform for Yerby to demonstrate both his racial consciousness and his penchant for detailed research, The Dahomean far exceeded Speak Now in critical acclaim. In the novel, through a re-creation of nineteenth-century Dahomean culture, Yerby probes the richness and variety of the culture of Dahomey, creating noteworthy historical fiction. While Lael Pritchard praised the novel in Best Sellers in 1971, observing “The Dahomean is a rare book indeed…. The book does not glamorize; it describes with insight what was,”33 Darwin T. Turner concluded in Black World in 1972 that The Dahomean was Yerby’s most satisfying novel.34
The Dahomean is a contemporary African American novel with an African setting, and as Dave Khune concludes, it is perhaps the most detailed descriptions of African culture in American fiction.35 Between the novel’s prologue and the concluding scene, both of which are set in America, Yerby acquaints his readers with the intricate complexities of Dahomean culture. In an introductory note to the novel, Yerby admonishes his readers: “The purpose of the The Dahomean is admittedly to correct, so far as it is possible, the Anglo-Saxon reader’s historical perspective. For among the countless tragedies caused by North American slavery was the destruction of the high, and in many ways, admirable, culture of the African.” As the novel unfolds, Yerby explores in detail Dahomean religion, magic, family life, rituals, war, and technology. Additionally, providing a balanced view of the culture, he focuses on such negatives as polygamy, female genital mutilation, and absolute power. Most objectionable to Yerby is the latter, which also informs his characterization. At the end of the novel, Nyasanu is captured, sold into slavery and transported to the United States; and as the novel ends, Nyasanu, now called Wesley Parks in America, declares that he will one day reveal the horrors of life in slavery. In 1976 when this author interviewed Yerby and engaged him in a conversation about his protagonists, particularly his failure to write about an African American protagonist in an American setting, Yerby declared that he planned to do so in the future. In A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979), the sequel to The Dahomean, he did. An excoriating indictment of the slaveholding antebellum South and its impositions on the slave and the master, A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest is the story of the conflict between Wes Parks, a slave yearning for freedom, and Pamela Bibbs, a transplanted Northerner, who becomes the embodiment of the brutality and inhumanity of slavery.
Yerby’s growing concern for his literary reputation coupled with his living and traveling abroad also converged as he searched for significance in his writing. In his Ebony interview, Yerby pronounced that his most recent novels, The Old Gods Laugh (1964) and An Odor of Sanctity (1965) were historical novels and therefore different from his previous costume novels. Additionally, he characterized Goat Song (1967) and Judas, My Brother (1969) as serious novels. Reflecting his extensive travels and painstaking research of subjects for his novels, Goat Song is set in ancient Greece; and Judas, My Brother, a re-creation of the beginnings of Christianity, variously explores the locales of Galilee, Jerusalem, and Rome. Admittedly controversial, Judas, My Brother, according to Yerby, is the result of thirty years of research, and it did significantly improve the critical reception of his fiction. Reviewers discerned a more serious effort in his fiction and praised his accomplishment. In 1969, black scholar Darwin T. Turner wrote: “ … although he may disappoint enthusiasts and literary purists, Yerby has developed his most significant theme….”36 Instead of merely entertaining his readers in Judas, My Brother, therefore, Yerby deliberately provokes thought about Christian myths.
Though many of his novels are Southern historical romances, Yerby was also cognizant of his becoming too provincial as a writer. Thus, while continuing to examine the myths and legends of the South, he increasingly explored other regions of America and the Western world. Yerby demonstrated that he could write convincingly about other cultures as early as his third novel, The Golden Hawk (1948), which chronicles the piratical adventures of Kit Gerado in the seventeenth-century West Indies. Although it retains a pronounced southern flavor, Yerby’s fourth novel Pride’s Castle (1949) tells the story of a transplanted southerner in the North. Another three years passed before The Saracen Blade (1952), Yerby’s fourth novel with a foreign setting; and one year after his self-exile from the United States, he published The Devil’s Laughter (1953), a novel about the turbulent years of the French Revolution. In 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968 respectively, he published The Old Gods Laugh, An Odor of Sanctity, Goat Song, and Judas, My Brother, followed by Speak Now (1969) and The Dahomean (1971), all with foreign settings. Spanish-speaking countries are the subject of Yerby’s last two novels about cultures other than America. While A Rose For Ana Maria (1976) explores revolutionary activities in Spain, Yerby’s adopted home country, Hail the Conquering Hero (1977) focuses on government corruption in Latin American Costa Verde. It is not surprising, however, that Yerby’s fiction increasingly portrays characters in other cultures, for his voluntary self-exile, his expanding interest in other cultures, and his popularity abroad no doubt combined to influence his choices of literary materials.
In fact, Yerby published only five novels set in the United States after 1962, but he never really abandoned America or the South, his favorite literary settings. Both A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979) and McKenzie’s Hundred (1985), written during the latter years of Yerby’s career, are set in the United States. While the former exposes the ills of American slavery in the South, the latter tells the story of a Virginia woman spy for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In between these two novels, Yerby also published two novels with a Southern flavor but set in other regions of America. Western, A Saga of the Great Plains (1982) is the story of a Civil War veteran who migrates to Kansas in search of peace, and Devilseed (1984) features another Yerby female protagonist who migrates from Louisiana to San Francisco during the gold rush days and rises to the highest level of society.
In the genre of popular fiction in which he chose to carve his niche, it was inevitable that Yerby would quickly become an anomaly in African American fiction. Although his overwhelming success in the field of popular fiction did not establish him as the first black American to write historical fiction or to write about white protagonists, what distinguishes him from other African American writers is that he, adopting almost totally the vernacular of popular fiction, restricted himself to writing predominantly about whites. Thus, his decision to write for a popular fiction audience precluded the visibility of overt, traditional racial protest in his writing, placing him squarely outside the mainstream of African American fiction. Although writing popular fiction for the larger predominantly white audience promised Yerby greater popularity and success, it simultaneously placed restrictions on the type of fiction he could write.
On the surface, the absence of an overt protest seems another glaring distinction between Yerby and his contemporaries of African American fiction. The costume romances Yerby chose to write, however, were not entirely outside the pale of protest fiction. In lieu of the overt racial protest of mainstream African American fiction, Yerby’s novels reveal a distinct transformation of the protest aim. Modifying the protest impulse evident in his early short stories and using history and social and philosophical commentary, Yerby retains in various modified ways the original aim of protest fiction. His social criticism includes but transcends matters of race, exposing injustices perpetrated against blacks, debunking myths of American and Western cultures, arguing the realities of history and commenting on human values. Not surprisingly, the same racial attitudes Yerby conveys in his black protest stories pervade his popular fiction, sometimes in obvious and sometimes in disguised ways.
In his transition from protest to popular fiction, there is little doubt but that Yerby effected a compromise, however large or small; but it was a compromise he was obviously willing to make. At the same time, the price of succeeding as a popular fiction writer commanded his subversion of racial concerns, resulting in even greater compromise. In pursuit of his career in popular fiction, Yerby elected to write historical romances because they brought money and fame, though they obviously cost him literary respect. Yerby, apprenticed in the tradition of protest fiction, adapted protest to the medium of popular fiction and continued to attack racism, hypocrisy, and oppression. In fact, as he established himself in the arena of popular fiction, Yerby adopted a special mission—use of historical data to debunk the inaccuracies of myths and legends in the historical periods and cultures about which he wrote. In his use of historical data, Yerby reveals gross historical inaccuracies, corrects common misconceptions, reaffirms historical truths, and comments on human nature. Avoiding the label of historical novelist, he preferred to call his fiction “costume novels” because, as he said, Dial Press often excised much of the historical data he included. Any careful perusal of his costume novels, however, reveals that historical data in Yerby’s novels is as important if not more than the trappings of historical romance.
Thus, Yerby’s costume novels are not the traditional romances of hearts and flowers. In addition to entertaining the reader, his costume novels incorporate a modern realistic perspective, a spirit of protest, and the author’s philosophical views. Unlike the typical hero of the historical romance, however, Yerby’s protagonists are not all brave men and women who achieve honor, fame, and happiness; and while almost all struggle to secure a place in an alien culture, they often remained alienated. Yerby’s protagonists, like the heroes in the picaresque novel, are also alienated by circumstances of birth or their past; and as they seek to establish themselves in alien cultures, they are not always patriotic or heroic. More often than not, they resist conformity to societal codes and victimize all who stand between them and their goals. While they engage in perilous adventures, they find little honor or glory in them. Like other writers of traditional picaresque fiction, Yerby is implicitly satirical of the heroic ideal, and thus his novels contain two poles of interest—one, the protagonist and his adventures and the other, the society that the protagonist pillories.
During his brief time in Chicago, Yerby established himself as one of the emerging writers of the Chicago Renaissance. The “most typical as well as the famous example of the Depression-bred Chicago Renaissance writers,” Bontemps declares in “Famous WPA Writers,” “was Richard Wright”(43–47); and early in his career, Frank Yerby was expected to follow Wright’s example. Yerby opted, however, for another route to literary success. Though he never achieved the critical acclaim of other Chicago Renaissance writers, Yerby’s achievements as a popular fiction novelist propelled him into a singularly unique position in the history of African American literature. As an African American writer, he captured the imagination of his readers for almost a half century writing entertaining fiction, and his venture into popular fiction provided him with the best of two worlds. He could enjoy the financial rewards and popularity of a writer read by the millions, and he could execute his own sense of mission by pointing out the weaknesses of the very cultures he was re-creating. Yet, it was not by way of the latter but the former image of the popular writer that Yerby became known to Americans.
If Yerby was slow in admitting his concessions as a popular writer, his critics were not; for it was primarily the social, political, and economic issues, not the literary, which dominated critical reactions to Yerby in America. Most of the critical reactions to Yerby’s fiction relate, as might be expected, to his varying public images. It was not long after he began publishing, however, that critics began to call for more from Yerby—black critics for more racially relevant fiction and white critics for more meaningful novels. When Yerby did not meet either of these expectations, critical reviews of his novels waned in later years, causing Yerby to develop a search for meaning in his writing. While he did eventually write more meaningful fiction, namely Judas, My Brother, Speak Now, and The Dahomean, he never again achieved the level of success he enjoyed early in his career, and critical literary acclaim always eluded him. Even though most critics either lauded his accomplishments or dismissed him, no significant history of American popular fiction or African American literature can completely ignore him.
The significance of Yerby’s historical fiction cannot really be determined by the millions of novels he sold or his enduring popularity as a costume novelist. Any serious assessment of his fiction must involve the motivations of the writer, for although the ideas in his novels have often been misread or simply ignored, the import of Yerby’s fiction is not romance but actually historical and social criticism. In his transition from protest to popular fiction, Yerby effected his own dual isolation as a writer in the American literary world—isolation from the African American literary tradition in which he was apprenticed and isolation within the very literary genre in which he achieved unprecedented success. Confronted with his growing isolation in popular fiction, Yerby developed his own sense of a mission in his writing; and incorporating the original critical and satirical aims of protest fiction into his popular fiction, he became perhaps America’s greatest debunker of its legendary past.
Frank Yerby died of conjunctive heart failure in Madrid on November 29, 1991, at the age of 76 and is buried in the Almudena Cemetery. Like his expatriation, however, his death created little fanfare. His wife Blanquita Calle-Perez was the only person who attended the burial ceremony held on Sunday, a day not normal for funerals in Spain, and notice of his death came several weeks later. In fact, on his death bed, Yerby exacted a promise from his wife that his funeral would have no guests except her and that she would not announce his death until five weeks later.
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6. “Frank Yerby.” Current Biography, 672–74.
7. Yerby, Frank. Letter to the author, February 24, 1974.
8. Yerby, Frank. Letter to the author, September 7, 1973.
9. Ibid.
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16. Yerby, Frank. “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel.” Harper’s 219 (1959): 145–50.
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———. A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest: A Tale of the Slaveholding South. New York: Dial Press, 1979; London: Grenada, 1981.
———. “A Date with Vera.” Fisk Herald 31 (1937): 16–17.
———. “All I Have Known.” Fisk Herald 31 (1937): 14.
———. An Odor of Sanctity: A Novel of Medieval Moorish Spain. New York: Dial Press, 1965; London: Heinemann, 1966.
———. A Rose for Ana Maria. New York: Dial Press, 1976; London: Heinemann, 1976.
———. A Woman Called Fancy. New York: Dial Press, 1951; London: Heinemann, 1952.
———. Benton’s Row. New York: Dial Press, 1954; London: Heinemann, 1955.
———. “Bitter Lotus.” Fisk Herald 31 (1937): 22.
———. “Brevity.” Challenge 1 (1934): 27.
———. Bride of Liberty. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954; London, Heinemann, 1955.
———. “A Calm after Storm.” Shards 4 (1936): 20.
———. Captain Rebel. New York: Dial Press, 1956; London, Heinemann, 1957.
———. Devilseed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984; London: Grenada, 1984.
———. “Drought.” Challenge 1 (1935): 15.
———. Fairoaks. New York: Dial Press, 1957; London: Heinemann, 1958.
———. Floodtide. New York: Dial Press, 1950; London: Heinemann, 1951.
———. Gillian. New York: Dial Press, 1960; London: Heinemann, 1961.
———. Goat Song: A Novel of Ancient Greece. New York: Dial Press, 1967; London: Heinemann, 1968.
———. Griffin’s Way. New York: Dial Press, 1962; London: Heinemann, 1963.
———. Hail the Conquering Hero. New York: Dial Press, 1977; London: Heinemann, 1978.
———. “Health Card.” Harper’s 188 (1944): 448–53.
———. “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel.” Harper’s 219 (1959): 45–150.
———. Jarrett’s Jade. New York: Dial Press, 1959; London: Heinemann, 1960.
———. Judas, My Brother: The Story of the Thirteenth Disciple. New York: Dial Press, 1968; London: Heinemann, 1969.
———. “Love Story.” The Paineite (1937): 15–16.
———. McKenzie’s Hundred. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985; London: Grafton, 1986.
———. “Miracles.” Challenge 1 (1934): 27.
———. “My Brother Went to College.” Tomorrow 5 (1946): 9–12.
———. Pride’s Castle. New York: Dial Press, 1949; London: Heinemann, 1950.
———. “Problems Confronting the Little Theatre in the Negro College.” Southern University Bulletin 27 (1941): 96–103.
———. “Roads Going Down.” Common Ground 5 (Summer 1945): 67–72.
———. Speak Now: A Modern Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1969; London: Heinemann, 1973.
———. The Dahomean: An Historical Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1971. Republished as The Man from Dahomey. London: Heinemann, 1971.
———. The Devil’s Laughter. New York: Dial Press, 1953; London: Heinemann, 1954.
———. “The Fishes and the Poet’s Hand.” Fisk Herald 31 (1938): 10–11.
———. The Foxes of Harrow. New York: Dial Press, 1946; London: Heinemann, 1947.
———. The Garfield Honor. New York: Dial Press, 1961; London: Heinemann, 1962.
———. The Girl from Storyville: A Victorian Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1972; London: Heinemann, 1972.
———. The Golden Hawk. New York: Dial Press, 1948; London: Heinemann, 1949.
———. “The Homecoming.” Common Ground 6 (1946): 41–47.
———. “The Little Theater in the Negro College.” Master’s Thesis, Fisk University, 1938.
———. The Old Gods Laugh: A Modern Romance. New York: Dial Press, 1964; London: Heinemann, 1964.
———. The Saracen Blade. New York: Dial Press, 1952; London: Heinemann, 1953.
———. The Serpent and the Staff. New York: Dial Press, 1958; London: Heinemann, 1959.
———. “The Thunder of God.” New Anvil 1 (1939): 5–8.
———. The Treasure of Pleasant Valley. New York: Dial Press, 1955; London: Heinemann, 1956.
———. The Vixens. New York: Dial Press, 1947; London: Heinemann, 1948.
———. The Voyage Unplanned. New York: Dial Press, 1974; London: Heinemann, 1974.
———. “Three Sonnets.” Challenge 1 (1936): 11–12.
———. “To a Seagull.” Challenge 1 (1935): 15.
———. Tobias and the Angel. New York: Dial Press, 1975; London: Heinemann, 1975.
———. “Weltschmerz.” Shards 4 (1936): 9.
———. Western: A Saga of the Great Plains. New York: Dial Press, 1982; London: Grenada, 1983.
———. “White Magnolias.” Phylon 5 (1944): 319–26.
———. “Wisdom.” Arts Quarterly 1(1937): 34.
———. “You Are a Part of Me.” Fisk Herald 31 (1937): 15.
———. “Young Man Afraid.” Fisk Herald 31 (1937): 10–11.