Rediscovering Frank Yerby

Rediscovering Frank Yerby
Author: Matthew Teutsch
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496827848

Contributions by Catherine L. Adams, Stephanie Brown, Gene Andrew Jarrett, John Wharton Lowe, Guirdex Massé, Anderson Rouse, Matthew Teutsch, Donna-lyn Washington, and Veronica T. Watson Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays is the first book-length study of Yerby’s life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion. The contributors to this collection work to rectify the misunderstandings of Yerby’s work that have relegated him to the sidelines and, ultimately, begin a reexamination of the importance of “the prince of pulpsters” in American literature. It was Robert Bone, in The Negro Novel in America, who infamously dismissed Frank Yerby (1916–1991) as “the prince of pulpsters.” Like Bone, many literary critics at the time criticized Yerby’s lack of focus on race and the stereotypical treatment of African American characters in his books. This negative labeling continued to stick to Yerby even as he gained critical success, first with The Foxes of Harrow, the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies, and later as he began to publish more political works like Speak Now and The Dahomean. However, the literary community cannot continue to ignore Frank Yerby and his impact on American literature. More than a fiction writer, Yerby should be put in conversation with such contemporaneous writers as Richard Wright, Dorothy West, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and more.

The Short Stories of Frank Yerby

The Short Stories of Frank Yerby
Author: Veronica T. Watson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496828550

Frank Yerby’s first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, established him as a writer and launched a forty-nine-year career in which he published thirty-three novels. He also became the first African American writer to sell more than a million copies of his work and to have a book adapted into a movie by a Hollywood studio. He garnered legions of loyal fans of his writing. Yet, few know that Yerby began his writing career with the publication of a short story in his school newspaper in 1936, the first of nine stories he would publish in the 1930s and ’40s. Most stories appeared in small journals and magazines and were largely forgotten once he started writing novels. This groundbreaking collection gives readers access to an intriguingly diverse selection of Yerby’s short fiction. The stories collected here, eleven of which have never previously been published, paint a picture of Yerby as an intellectual who thought deeply about several philosophical questions at the center of understanding what it means to be human. The stories also reveal him as an artist committed to exploring a range of human drives, longings, conflicts, and passions, from the quirky to the serious, and in a variety of writing styles. With an attention to historical detail, voice, and character that he became known for, these stories give us new insights into this important African American writer who dared to believe he could earn a living as a writer.

FLOODTIDE

FLOODTIDE
Author: FRANK YERBY
Publisher:
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1901
Genre:
ISBN:

The Vixens

The Vixens
Author: Frank Yerby
Publisher:
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1960
Genre:
ISBN:

The Souls of White Folk

The Souls of White Folk
Author: Veronica T. Watson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-08-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496801482

The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of “race” when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names “the literature of white estrangement.” In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

The Voyage Unplanned

The Voyage Unplanned
Author: Frank Yerby
Publisher: Pan
Total Pages: 544
Release: 1974
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9780330246316