protagonist, Joubert Antoine Jones, who, like Na-
thaniel, experiences an epiphany that reveals the
redemptive power of African-American cultural
heritage and the necessity to re-create this force
in his own life. Divine Days develops around the
conflict between the hipster Sugar-Grove and the
trickster W. A. D. Ford and Joubert’s relationship
to them. However, the novel involves far more epi-
sodes and themes than this. As a whole, the 1,135-
page comic epic richly explores a wide range of
African-American experiences, including spiritu-
ality, myth, culture, and music. Central to each of
these themes is the quest for transcendence.
In Forrest’s final work, a collection of novellas
titled Meteor in the Madhouse (published posthu-
mously in 2001), Joubert returns as the narrat-
ing voice and brings the fictional world of Forest
County to a close. By engaging a variety of charac-
ters, all of whom struggle to define their identity
in a post–Jim Crow world, Meteor moves across
the full spectrum of post-1970s rhetoric. Perhaps
more so than in the other novels, which tend to ex-
amine the agony of a highly racial existence caused
by external forces, Meteor turns the critique to a
more internal investigation and is critical of many
cultural responses that have erroneously become
widely accepted as worthy solutions to enduring
and transcending racism.
As a major author in contemporary African-
American literature, Leon Forrest and his body
of fiction aggressively deal with the soul’s condi-
tion and the contemporary African American’s re-
sponse to the soul in agony. In short, his narratives
acknowledge that African Americans created and
used cultural traditions to survive the past, and he,
in turn, uses these traditions as springboards into
his writing and transforms them to lyrical fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Byerman, Keith E. “Orphans and Circuses: The Lit-
erary Experiments of Leon Forrest and Clarence
Major.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition
and Form in Recent Black Fiction, 238–274. Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Cawelti, John. Leon Forrest: Introductions and Inter-
pretations. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1997.
Rosenburg, Bruce A. “Forrest Spirits: Oral Echoes in
Leon Forrest’s Prose.” Oral Tradition 9 (October
1994): 315–327.
Special Leon Forrest Issue. Callaloo 16 (Spring
1993).
Williams, Dana A. “In the Light of Likeness—Trans-
formed”: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest. Colum-
bus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.
———. “Preachin’ and Singin’ Just to Make It Over:
The Gospel Impulse as Survival Strategy in Leon
Forrest’s Bloodworth Trilogy.” African American
Review 36 (Fall 2002): 475–485.
Dana A. WilliamsFoxes of Harrow, The
Frank Garvin Yerby (1946)
With the publication of his first novel, The Foxes
of Harrow (1946), FRANK YERBY made an abrupt
transition from writing black protest fiction
(mostly short stories) to writing American popu-
lar fiction. Sales of The Foxes of Harrow skyrock-
eted, magazines reprinted condensed versions,
Twentieth Century Fox purchased the screen
rights, and by the end of 1946, more than a mil-
lion copies had been sold. Although subsequently
Yerby would publish an impressive list of best sell-
ers, The Foxes of Harrow remains, in many ways,
his most commercially defining novel. It cata-
pulted him to national recognition as a writer, it
established the costume romance formula he used
in most of his successive novels, and it charted a
course for him to gain singular distinction as the
first African American to become a millionaire by
writing fiction.
Set in the antebellum South, The Foxes of Har-
row is a historical romance that chronicles the ad-
ventures of Stephen Fox, an Irish immigrant who
rises from poverty to wealth in New Orleans soci-
ety, between 1825 and 1865. The novel begins with
Fox being thrown off a steamboat on the Missis-
sippi River and ends with the destruction of his
plantation, Harrow. Between these years, however,
Fox amasses a fortune from gambling, wins recog-
nition among New Orleans aristocrats, sells cotton,
and marries into a prominent family. Remaining19 0 Foxes of Harrow, The