Yerby, Frank (Garvin) (1916-1991)

US writer. He first gained recognition for his short stories about racial injustice, but he turned to writing best-selling romantic adventure novels, such as The Foxes of Harrow (1946).

Born in Augusta, Georgia, he studied at Paine College, gaining a BA in 1937, and Fisk University, gaining an MA in 1938, and at the graduate level at the University of Chicago in 1939. He taught English in the South (1939-41), and worked as a laboratory technician (1941-44), and as chief inspector for Fairchild Aircraft in Jamaica, New York (1944-45). He lived in Florida in the early 1950s, before settling in Madrid, Spain, in 1955. The child of a racially mixed couple, he was chided by some black American critics for not focusing on racial issues, but he did deal with Africa in The Dahomean: An Historical Novel (1971).