The Devil's Laughter

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. Although it became a best-seller (making him the first African-American to produce a best-seller in the U.S.) and went on to become a 20th Century Fox film called "Foxes", he was criticized for showing a lack of racial consciousness in his work. Critics called The Foxes of Harrow another "Gone With The Wind." Although he objected to this criticism, his novels of the 1950s and 1960s began to address issues of race. In 1955 he left the United States in protest against racial discrimination and moved to Spain, where he remained for the rest of his life.