Frank Yerby

It’s the birthday of American writer Frank Yerby (books by this author), born in Augusta, Georgia (1916). He was the first African-American to become a best-selling novelist when his book The Foxes of Harrow (1946) became an international sensation. Yerby’s big break came when an editor at Dial Press urged him to try novels instead of short stories. Over a weekend, he wrote 27 pages of what would be The Foxes of Harrow, about an Irish gambler in pre-Civil War New Orleans. He received a $250.00 advance, and the book was later made into a movie starring Maureen O’Hara and Rex Harrison (1947).

Yerby wrote 33 novels in all, mostly romance and historical fiction, all best-sellers. He once said cheerfully, “I’ve written some very bad books.” About his critics, he shrugged: “Too many of them are failed novelists who don’t know how to read. They should be licensed, like doctors and lawyers.”

Frank Yerby immigrated to Spain in 1955 and never returned to the United States. He’d grown weary of the racial discrimination in the U.S., saying: “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.”


“I'll tell you the one that I think will: when a mans in love he wants to keep the one he loves- and cherish her. He wants to build a picket fence twixt them and the world. He doesn't want it temporary, a secret, hidden. He wants the world to know. The one he loves is somebody to him, not a thing to be taken, used and tossed aside. Hell, I'm not saying he shouldn't be interested in your pretty ankles and what a nice sway your bustles got. That's part of it too; but only a part. The rest of it is the long years ahead, the laughing together, and the crying, bringing up your kids, nodding together under the lamplight when your heads have turned white, and finally lying together forever in the long dark...”
― Frank Yerby, A Woman Called Fancy

“And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener! We can't resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once-old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.”
― Frank Yerby, A Woman Called Fancy

“When it was over, it was not really over, and that was the trouble.”
― Frank Yerby