Frank Yerby
Frank Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, United States on September 5th, 1916 and is the Novelist. At the age of 75, Frank Yerby biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 75 years old, Frank Yerby has this physical status:
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. He would continue to publish poetry and short stories while he was a student at Paine College and Fisk University. While he was a student at the University of Chicago, he worked for the Federal Writers Project, writing about religious groups he observed on the south side of Chicago as part of the social history The Negro in Illinois under the supervision of the dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham.
Yerby continued to publish short stories and wrote the manuscript of a protest novel, "This is My Own," about a black steel worker turned boxer who comes to a tragic end while he worked in the defense industry. That manuscript was rejected, but the editor Muriel Fuller of Redbook encouraged him to send her something else. He sent her the short story "Health Card." She decided it was unsuitable for Redbook, but she sent it to Harper's, which published it in 1944. "Health Card" won the prestigious O. Henry Memorial Prize for best short story. The success of "Health Card" earned Yerby a book contract with Dial Press. The rejection of "This is My Own" caused Yerby to abandon protest literature in favor of historical fiction.
Private life
Yerby married Flora Helen Claire Williams (1921 - 2001) in 1941. They had four children. The couple separated in 1955, and their divorce was finalized in 1956.
Yerby left the United States in 1952, in protest against racial discrimination, and moved to Nice, France, for three years. In 1955, he moved to Madrid, Spain where he remained for the rest of his life. Yerby married Blanca Calle-Perez in 1956.
Yerby died from liver cancer in Madrid and was interred there in the Cementerio de la Almudena, the biggest Spanish cemetery.