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Augusta, Georgia, native Frank Yerby lived his life and his literary career struggling with racism and became an internationally best-selling author of historical fiction, but the isolation he encountered in his native country forced him to conclude his remarkable career as an American exile in Spain. Born September 5, , to Rufus Garvin and Wilhelmina Yerby, Frank Yerby's early life was marked by racial conflict, a thread that would run through his fiction.

Though he identified as black, Yerby's parents were a racially mixed couple, and the young Yerby had to fight for acceptance from blacks as well as whites. Late in his career, Yerby told a People magazine interviewer, "When I was young, a bunch of us black kids would get in a fight with white kids and, then, I'd have to fight with a black kid who got on me for being so light.

After obtaining a B. College in Tallahassee, Florida. He taught there for one term, and then Yerby moved to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he taught for another year. However Yerby wanted to write, not teach, and quickly tired of academia. Giving up his teaching career, he took a job with Ford Motor Co. Yerby worked several years before his first published short story, "Health Card" appeared in Harper's Magazine in , but it was an instant success, winning an O.

Henry Memorial Award for best first short story. Yerby dealt with similar issues in two more of his early stories, "White Magnolias" Phylon, and "The Homecoming". In each of these three stories, Frank Yerby explores the difficulties faced by African-Americans who want to transcend the negative stereotypes of blacks held by whites.

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Drawing upon his own youthful experiences, Yerby crafts African-American characters who are strong and intelligent, yet still held at the margins of society by the inability of the white characters they encounter to see beyond the stereotypical views of blacks as illiterates, prostitutes, or servants. Though his early short fiction was received well critically, Yerby was dismayed by its lack of commercial success.

He'd hoped to reach out to the public through his fiction and expose the follies of segregation and racial stereotyping, but the public, he felt, wasn't interested in what he was trying to say. Yerby expressed his frustration thusly in an interview with Harper's Magazine : "The idea dawned on me that to continue to follow the route I had mapped out for myself was roughly analogous to shouting one's head off in Mammoth Cave.