About Frank Yerby
Frank Garvin Yerby ((1916-09-05)September 5, 1916 – (1991-11-29)November 29, 1991) was an American writer, best known for his 1946 historical novel The Foxes of Harrow. == Early life == Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916, the second of four children of Rufus Garvin Yerby (1886–1961), a hotel doorman, and Wilhelmina Ethel Yerby (née Smythe) (1888–1960), a teacher. Yerby's ancestry was Black, White, and Native American. Yerby would later refer to himself as "a young man whose list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations." One of Yerby's siblings was Alonzo Yerby, Associate Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and New York City Hospitals Commissioner. As a child, Yerby attended Augusta's Haines Institute, a private school for African Americans founded by Lucy Laney, from which he graduated in 1933. In 1937, he graduated from Paine College with a B.A. in English, and earned his M.A. in Dramatic Arts from Fisk University in 1938. In 1938, he began courses for a doctorate in English at the University of Chicago, but left school for financial reasons in 1939. He was a professor of English at Florida A&M University from 1939 - 1940 and then Southern University in Louisiana from 1940 - 1941, before moving to Detroit and New York, where he worked in wartime defense industries. He began his literary career while he was a student at Paine College by publishing poetry, starting with the poems "Miracles" and "Brevity" in the September 1934 issue of New Challenge, a literary magazine published by Dorothy West. Two years later, Yerby would publish his first short story, "Salute to the Flag," in the November 1936 issue of The Paineite, the student newspaper of Paine College.
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