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 The connection between Yerby’s first unpublished protest novel and his second, however, has never been explored.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.

“I Ain’t no Man!”

As an African American man in Augusta, a town deeply rooted in the racist ideologies and practices of the segregated South, Frank Yerby certainly had had enough experiences with Jim Crow living, discrimination, and racial terrorism to fuel his writing for a lifetime. Despite becoming best-known, perhaps, for his prolific authorship of novels that focused primarily on white lives and characters, Yerby commented in an interview with Maryemma Graham, “In every novel I have written about the American South, I have subtly infused a very strong defense of Black history and Black people” (70). Rhetorical defenses in novels that are largely not about Black lives are certainly worth noting; however, in this chapter I argue that the exploration of the world as it impacted Black people was a more consistent interest for Yerby than many recognized. He wrote a number of short stories that specifically focused on the impacts of racism and subjugation on the Black psyche and identity, the intimate relationships between men and women of African descent, and the understandings and performances of Black masculinity.

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.