Focus on Yerby

This chapter explores teaching Yerby at his alma mater, a project rooted in a necessity to positively impact and inspire a new generation of students to read, write, and research the school’s most famous literary alumnus. The multi-year engagement with Yerby’s work involved students, faculty, and the community. With a writing career that spanned more than half of the twentieth century, Frank Yerby’s work has sporadically emerged as fertile ground for teaching and research at Paine College. The archives at Paine include correspondence between Yerby and his editor, Bob Cornfield, at Dial Press. Also included are programs and articles that document Yerby’s early connections to his former English professor, Emma C. W. Gray, Paine College’s President, E.C. Peters, and then reconnections that begin with President E. Clayton Calhoun (the last white president of the Paine College) in the mid-60s.

Finding the “Necessary Anguish”

Critics have been content to summarize Frank Yerby’s extensive oeuvre by claiming that after unsuccessful attempts to publish “This is My Own,” a protest novel, Yerby shifted his focus to “costume novels” centered on white characters in exotic settings. Critics continue by noting that in 1969 Yerby suddenly produced Speak Now, a novel centered around the story of a Black American expatriate musician who falls in love with a white Southern heiress. Some critics mention that between 1946 and 1969 Yerby produced a second “protest” novel, “The Tents of Shem,” which was twice rejected by publishers. The connection between Yerby’s first unpublished protest novel and his second, however, has never been explored. This chapter argues that “Tents” plays a crucial role in the evolution of Yerby’s work. “The Tents of Shem” is a bridge between early and late Yerby, one that helps to delineate both the continuity and the development of his politics and his art.

Circling the Boundaries of the Tradition

This chapter is not so much concerned with reviewing, assessing, or critically analyzing the body of Yerby’s work, as it is with delineating the writer’s relationship to these major literary moments that have characterized the black literary tradition at the midpoint of the twentieth century. To simply dismiss Frank Yerby as a peculiar case in African American writing is to miscalculate how significant turns in his literary career reflected dominant movements and trends, as well as formal and thematic innovations and limitations that have characterized the trajectory of African American literature from the early 1930s to the 1940s. This period ranges from the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement to an era of social realism in African American fiction.

Overstuffed and Undercooked

Published in 1946, Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow sold over 500,000 copies within its first two months; the novel’s sales numbers led to a film adaptation by Twentieth Century Fox the following year. Directed by John M. Stahl with a screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, the film eliminates most of the subversive elements found within Yerby’s text that seek to counter the glorification of a mythologized Old South that never truly existed. The removal of these aspects only serves to maintain the image of a glorified, idyll, and nostalgic South that the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939) epitomizes on screen. Ultimately, the movie falls short of serving as a major touchstone in cinematic history on the representation of African Americans on screen. Instead, it perpetuates, while also challenging in some ways, the continued view of African Americans in subservient roles to white masters.