Frank Garvin Yerby ((1916-09-05)September 5, 1916 – (1991-11-29)November 29, 1991) was an American writer, best known for his 1946 historical novel The Foxes of Harrow.

As a child, Yerby attended Augusta's Haines Institute, a private school for African Americans founded by Lucy Laney, from which he graduated in 1933.

[3] Two years later, Yerby would publish his first short story, "Salute to the Flag," in the November 1936 issue of The Paineite, the student newspaper of Paine College.

[8] Yerby continued to publish short stories and wrote the manuscript of a protest novel, "This is My Own," about a black steel worker turned boxer who comes to a tragic end while he worked in the defense industry.

[2] In mid-century, he began writing a series of best-selling historical novels ranging from the Athens of Pericles to Europe in the Dark Ages.

In 1946, he published The Foxes of Harrow, a Southern historical romance, which became the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies.

Ultimately, the book became a 1947 film of the same name starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design (Lyle R. Wheeler, Maurice Ransford, Thomas Little, Paul S.

[9] The novel, which focuses on the life of an enslaved African chief's son who is transported to America, serves as the culmination of Yerby's efforts toward incorporating racial themes into his works.

[11][9] In 2012, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article featuring an at-risk child whose life was turned around by reading Yerby books that one of his teachers was secretly providing to him.

[3] Yerby died from liver cancer in Madrid and was interred there in the Cementerio de la Almudena, the biggest Spanish cemetery.