WRIGHT, MARGARET WALKER, Nelson Algren, and
Katherine Dunham, among others. Though he
was only with the Chicago WPA for nine months,
Yerby concluded that his WPA apprenticeship was
some of the best training he had received. Finan-
cial problems, however, forced him to discontinue
his education and seek a teaching position, and
his departure from Chicago took him back to
the South, where he worked from 1939 to 1941,
one year as an English instructor at Florida A&M
University and another year at Southern Univer-
sity in Baton Rouge. While teaching at Southern
University, Yerby also married Flora Claire Wil-
liams of Alabama, whom he had met the previous
year. Since his marriage necessitated additional
income, he left his teaching position and moved
to New York; however, he was unable to find work
in New York and moved a year later to Detroit,
where he began work as a laboratory technician
with the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn,
Michigan, where he also renewed his lagging in-
terest in writing.
Like most of his contemporaries, Yerby began
his career writing protest stories. During the years
he worked at the Ford Motor Company, he wrote
the short stories he published and a protest novel
he submitted to a Redbook Magazine literary con-
test. Redbook rejected Yerby’s novel, but not with-
out encouragement. “This is a lousy novel,” wrote
Muriel Fuller, “but you sure can write. Send me
something else.” The “something else” Yerby sent
was “Health Card,” which Fuller, deciding that it
was not Redbook’s kind of material, sent to Harp-
er’s Magazine, where it was published in 1944.
Subsequently, Yerby published three short sto-
ries: “White Magnolias,” “Homecoming,” and “My
Brother Went to College.” After George Joel of Dial
Press expressed only a slight interest in Yerby’s
protest novel, however, Yerby concluded that pro-
test fiction had little priority with publishers and
switched to popular fiction. He convinced Joel to
let him attempt a fast-paced historical novel, and
on the strength of the first 27 pages, he received a
$250 advance. This was his first novel, The Foxes of
Harrow (1946).
The Foxes of Harrow catapulted Yerby into
national prominence as a writer, establishing his
commercially successful popular fiction formula
and initiating the meteoric rise and decline of his
critical reception in America. Set in the antebel-
lum South between 1825 and 1865, The Foxes of
Harrow is a historical romance that chronicles the
adventures of Stephen Fox, an Irish immigrant
outcast who successfully rises from poverty to
wealth in New Orleans society by less-than-admi-
rable means. A throwback to the picaresque tradi-
tion, The Foxes of Harrow reveals Yerby’s skillful
adaptation and manipulation of the genre to cre-
ate a vehicle for him both to write entertaining fic-
tion and debunk Southern myths. Yerby’s second
novel, The Vixens, continues the pattern estab-
lished in the first novel, and in such subsequent
novels as The Golden Hawk (1948), Pride’s Castle
(1949), and Floodtide (1950), critics noted his suc-
cess in manipulating the conventions of popular
fiction. In 1951, he published A Woman Called
Fancy, a novel most significant for his declaration
of his inability to endure the racism of America.
His expatriation therefore should not have come
as a surprise when, in 1952, Yerby departed Amer-
ica for France without fanfare.
Though Yerby continued to churn out his-
torical romances one after another, the critical
attention paid to his fiction declined significantly
during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his con-
cern about his critical reception prompted him to
try his hand again at writing about contemporary
issues. Therefore, in 1963, Yerby wrote The Tents
of Shem, a civil rights novel about a black couple
integrating an all-white neighborhood. Fearing
that Yerby’s protest novel would have neither the
popular nor the financial appeal of his previous
novels, his publishers advised against its publica-
tion. Yerby’s new willingness to demonstrate his
race consciousness, however, influenced his writ-
ing of two of his most important novels, Speak
Now (1969) and The Dahomean (1971). Critics
were quick to point out that Speak Now, Ye r b y ’s
first treatment of an African-American protago-
nist, deserted the historical romance genre, but his
next novel attracted significant critical acclaim.
Probably his best novel, The Dahomean is a pains-
taking re-creation of 19th-century Dahomean cul-
ture in Africa and the story of Hwesu, an AfricanYerby, Frank Gavin 571