Gillian

5 September 1916 – 29 November 1991

Frank Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, the son of a mixed-race marriage (his father was African American and his mother was caucasian). In 1937 he obtained a B.A. in English at Paine College and in 1938 he got an M.A. in English at Fisk University. After university, he taught English at Florida A. & M. College (now Florida A. & M. University) in Tallahassee, Florida for one term and then moved to Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA, where he taught for another year. He disliked teaching and moved instead to Detroit, Michigan, to work for the Ford Motor Co., which gave him time for writing. His first book, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), was a romance novel set in the Antebellum South. Alth…