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Author Frank Yerby was one of the most prolific and popular African American writers of his generation. He authored over thirty novels in his career with impressive success,
[T]hree were translated into film, one for television, twelve were bestsellers; almost all were selections of the Book of the Month Club; they have been translated into over thirty languages; and, to date, over sixty million copies of them have been sold around the world. (Jarrett 197)
Yerby's first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow, was quickly purchased by Twentieth Century-Fox after its publication and released in 1947 as a film With that milestone, Frank Yerby became the first African American author to have a literary work adapted into film by a major Hollywood studio. By most measures, this little-known author was not only a tremendously successful writer, but a groundbreaker, opening doors in the 1940s that were all but barred to African American artists. It would seem to follow that African American literary scholars would be interested his career and his craft. But we have not been. Few even know the name Frank Yerby any longer; few consider him an author worth reading.
Part of this critical silence undoubtedly grows from the fact that Yerby was a popular fiction writer; scholars did not perhaps find the high purpose and seriousness that they required of the best of African American literature, the texts that were becoming canonized in the 1940s and 50s through the scholarly work being done on them. Yerby was not a Richard Wright or a Gwendolyn Brooks. He wrote fiction designed to enthrall, "tossed off [to] amuse [him]self as much as... to entertain the reader." He called them "costume novels" to underscore the deliberateness with which he provided his readers stories designed to be interesting and to sell (Graham 70). But there also can be little argument that Yerby was not seriously engaged by academics and scholars of African American literature and studies because he did not write about the expected subject matter as a Black author. He did not engage in protest fiction or offer complex social analyses of Black America. He did not lament the injustices of American racial politics or explore the psychological impact of racism on African Americans. For you...