It’s the birthday of novelist Frank Garvin Yerby (1916-1991), whose books sold more than 60 million copies, mostly historical novels set in the antebellum South. Like Richard Wright from yesterday’s post, Yerby got fed up with American racism after WWII and eventually settled in Europe—in Yerby’s case, Madrid, Spain. But the two authors were otherwise very different: Wright offended some (and pleased others) with his fiction that protested racism, while Yerby, who was biracial, was often criticized for *not* addressing racism in his books.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, to a Scots-Irish mother and an African American/Native American father. (His parents were married though interracial marriage didn’t even become legal in Georgia until 1967.) Yerby studied locally at Paine College (1937) and got an M.A. at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught English briefly at Florida A&M College and at Southern University in Baton Rouge but then did technical work at Ford Motor Company and later in aviation.

Yerby won the 1944 O. Henry Memorial Award for his story “Health Card;” the award is given to the best first published story of the year. Yerby’s first novel, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), was enormously successful, and blackpast.org calls Yerby the first bestselling black novelist, although Richard Wright has also been called that. The Foxes of Harrow is about an Irish gambler who immigrates to New Orleans and becomes the patriarch of a plantation, fathering children by three different women (two of them white, one black). A quick look at reader reactions on Goodreads reveals a strong overall rating (four stars) and claims that his portrayal of the south was more complex and nuanced than that of Gone with the Wind, while being just as panoramic and bodice-rippy. (There’s your new adjective for the day.) Yerby went on to write more than thirty novels, three of which were made into movies: The Foxes of Harrow (1947), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954).

Yerby once said in an interview, “You can call me a racist if you like, because I dislike the human race. 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?’” (My source for this quotation is Yerby’s obituary in the LA Times, “Frank Yerby; Novelist Felt Rejected by His Native South,” January 9, 1992, but the article does not reveal the source of the original interview.)

While Yerby died in Madrid on November 29, 1991, of congestive heart failure, his wife, Blanca Calle Perez, followed his instructions to keep his death a secret for at least five weeks.

Have a strangely quiet, kids-back-at-school kind of Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.