Alpha Phi Alpha’s Frank Yerby Was The First Black Author to Publish a Best-Selling Novel

Did you know that the first Black author to write a million-selling novel was a two-time HBCU graduate from Georgia? His name was Frank Yerby, a brother of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., and his path to literary history ran through two historically Black institutions.

Frank Yerby was born on September 5, 1916, in Augusta, Georgia. He graduated from Paine College, the historically Black college in his hometown, with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1937, and earned his master’s degree from Fisk University, the historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1938. He later began doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Yerby also spent time in the classroom, teaching English at Florida A&M College, now Florida A&M University, in 1939, and at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1940 to 1941, giving him ties to four historically Black institutions in all.

Yerby was a brother of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans, founded in 1906 at Cornell University.

In 1946, Yerby published The Foxes of Harrow, a sweeping historical novel set in the antebellum South. According to the African American Literature Book Club, the book became the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies. Its success made Yerby a publishing sensation and earned him the nickname “king of the costume novel.”

He broke another barrier when Hollywood came calling. As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Yerby was the first African American to have a book purchased by a Hollywood studio for a film adaptation, and The Foxes of Harrow reached movie screens in 1947.

Over his career, Yerby wrote thirty-three novels and sold more than fifty-five million books worldwide, an extraordinary run for any author. In 1955 he moved abroad in a self-imposed exile, eventually settling in Madrid, Spain, where he continued to write for the rest of his life. Even from across the ocean, he stayed tied to the schools that shaped him, receiving honorary degrees from Fisk University in 1976 and Paine College in 1977.

Frank Yerby died on November 29, 1991, in Madrid. In 2006, he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

From Paine College and Fisk University to the top of the best-seller lists, Frank Yerby opened a door in American publishing that no Black author had walked through before him.