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Books So Bad They're Good: The Forgotten Man of Historical Fiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-21
We all have things we wish we could erase.
A harsh word during a fight.
A bad relationship.
A dream job that ends in disaster
A friendship inexplicably turns sour.
A moment, an instant, the wrong phrase, the wrong response...and suddenly a career is ruined, a marriage is over, a family is destroyed just...like...that.
You know what I mean. Every single one of you reading this, either tonight or in the future. It doesn’t matter what it is, why it happened, or whether the aftermath was a shattering tragedy or a minor annoyance. There is not a human alive who hasn’t had something happen that they would give their dominant arm to reverse.
Of course this isn’t possible. As Edward FitzGerald put it in his reworking of Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
This may be why time travel is so popular in science fiction, and I’m not just talking about about Doctor Who, The Time Machine, or the Star Trek movie where Captain Kirk et al. go back in time to save the whales. There are many, many, many SF novels where someone travels back to a significant event to try to reverse an outcome they don’t like, whether for good or ill, sometimes successfully, sometimes not; some are very dated (L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, about a modern archaeologist who manages to fend off what were then called The Dark Ages), others well written but intensely annoying (Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is all about attempting to reconstruct Coventry Cathedral to its pre-Blitz state even though the modern cathedral is a wonder in its own right), and still others disturbingly prescient (Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, where apartheid-loving South Africans give Robert E. Lee modern firearms so he can win the Civil War and preserve slavery).
There are even a few time travel romances, and no, I do not mean Diana Gabaldon’s unending (and interminable) Outlander series. Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time) and Jack Finney’s Time and Again both qualify, and if Bid Time Return is swooning and tragic, Time and Again is so beautifully constructed that no less than Stephen King dubbed it the time travel story for its combination of excellent plotting, period details, and the protagonist effectively trapping himself in the past for love.
Alas, these are all books. As much as I wish I could go back in time and prevent my younger self from marrying Wingding, I’m stuck where I am, doing what I do, sadder but wiser after what began as a love story ended very badly indeed. I can’t erase our time together, either, even if some of my friends cringe when I mention something that happened during the time he was part of my life. He was most definitely Mr. Wrong, but I learned a great deal about perseverance, grit, and life in general thanks to my time with him, and as badly as it ended I would not be who I am today without that relationship. Going back in time to erase my years with Wingding is tempting, but I’m not sure the result would have been worth it.
The same cannot be said of books and authors.
Aside from a handful of truly vile Books Too Horrible for Badbookistan, erasing the average book or author is not a good idea. Even the silliest novel can have a well-turned phrase, an emotionally resonant scene, or an intriguing plot twist, and even the most pedestrian hack can create a memorable character. A few weeks ago I wrote about a Bad Literary Book where the protagonist is so traumatized he rides around on a tractor instead of driving a car, and as ridiculous as the idea is, I can’t get parts of the book out of my head.
The same can be said for a raft of other books I’ve encountered over the years. E.E. “Doc” Smith wasn’t a particularly good writer by any means, but there are moments from the Lensman series that have stuck with me for fifty years. Ditto the Barsoom books of Edgar Rice Krispies Burroughs, certain issues of the National Lampoon, some of the Mystery Guild thrillers my aunt glommed down like candy...the list goes on and on. Some of these books have survived because of their authors’ ability to spin a yarn, others have faded into obscurity, but they all had their day, and may have another if tastes change and the right critic rediscovers them.
And then there are the books and authors that never should have been forgotten in the first place.
There are far, far too many of these to count, unfortunately. For every Book So Bad It’s Good in the High Library of the Heights, there are half a dozen that are well written, enjoyable, and worthy of attention. That their authors weren’t publicized correctly...that fashions in literature changed...that their plots are outdated and their characters of their time in ways that aren’t actually bigoted but are too cliched for the 21st century…the Manse of Forgotten Tomes is nearly as large as the High Library of the Heights, and a sadly large number of the books and authors and characters therein deserve far better. Here are just a few:
Miss Silver, the detective who had her own fanclub 80 years ago but is largely forgotten except by mystery fanatics.
The crew of the Rocketship Galileo, who fought Nazis on the Moon but rarely appear beside the other Heinlein juveniles.
Ouida and Bryher and a whole generation of women whose work still hasn’t gotten the critical attention they deserve.
Entire libraries of Jacobean plays that aren’t performed unless someone digs up a connection to Shakespeare or Marlowe.
Even truly great authors and once-influential books sometimes appear here; JRR Tolkien’s delightful Christmas letters to his children, the adventures of Felix Krull the Confidence Man, Wordsworth and Hemingway’s later works, untranslated volumes by Dumas pere et fils, Amadis de Gaula and its sequels, almost all of Lope de Vega, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Titurel – the list is too long, and too depressing, to count.
Tonight’s author is one of those. A pioneer in certain ways, a bestseller almost to the end of a long and fruitful career, he’s all but forgotten today. It’s not clear why – at his best he’s very good, and even at his worst he’s a fun read – but it’s well past time this author got another look from the literary establishment:
The Foxes of Harrow and over thirty other books, by Frank Yerby – I first encountered Frank Yerby in another person’s work. A character who is isolated and bored receives a CARE package from a relative that includes toiletries, snacks, and one of Yerby’s novels to read if they become desperate. It’s basically a throwaway line, rather if today someone in a similar situation received a package of cheap razors, a snack-size bag of gummi coatimundis, and the latest Dan Brown. The implication was that Frank Yerby was a mediocre writer, his work good enough to read in a pinch but not much more, and just as disposable as the razors.
There are plenty of similar authors and books, and so I shrugged, read on, and basically put Frank Yerby out of my mind for several years. Then a local bookstore, the late and much-missed Sage Books, received a cache of gently used copies of Frank Yerby’s historical fiction. One of them looked interesting, and it came home along with whatever else Wingding and I bought that day.
Much to our surprise, it was good.
The writing was several cuts above average, unexpectedly so. The plotting was excellent, ditto the characters, while the historical background was well-researched enough that it was clear Yerby had done his homework. It wasn’t up to the level of, say, Mary Renault or Patrick O’Brian, but it was within striking distance of Howard Fast or C.S. Forrester, and we quickly cleaned out the rest of Sage’s Frank Yerby collection.
Some of his books were a bit cliched, or clearly hoping to capitalize on the success of whatever had hit the bestseller lists or been adapted for that year’s blockbuster film. Overall, though, Yerby’s novels were (and are) well worth reading, solid entertainment with a dash of social commentary. I would still have them in my library if Wingding, who liked historical fiction a bit more than I did, had not packed them up along with our complete set of Aubrey/Maturin when he left me for Secunda and yes, I’m still annoyed a quarter of a century later . Maybe Frank Yerby wasn’t a Patrick O’Brian, but then again, who is?
Regardless, I was intrigued by Frank Yerby and his story, and as anyone who knows me (or has read these diaries) is well aware, once I’m intrigued I start digging. Sometimes I run into obstacles, but when I have the bit in my teeth I keep going. I spent several decades tracking down the source of a specific reference to a patchwork wedding outfit, and no, I am not joking; one of my summer projects is preparing a paper on my research for publication, and if it’s accepted it’ll see print only about thirty-five years after I first encountered that reference.
Fortunately Frank Yerby was much easier to track down than a 16th century diary entry, but what I found was nearly as surprising. For it seems that Frank Garvin Yerby, author of historical fiction, was one of the authors whose entire career has basically been erased through no fault of his own.
Yerby’s own life might be the stuff of a novel. Novelist, prize winning author of short fiction, teacher, he was also a factory worker, college professor, poet, and historian of religion. He had multiple degrees from some of America’s best known university, and by the time he moved to Spain in middle age he was one of the best selling authors of his age.
He was also a man who never quite fit in anywhere.
This began when Yerby was a child. His father and mother were descended from multiple races and ethnicities, with Yerby himself claiming his “list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations.” He identified as black and attended black schools, but similar to NAACP head Walter White, Yerby was so fair skinned that some of his neighbors questioned whether he really was black, or at least black enough to be fully accepted.
There was no question of his intelligence, however, or his talent. He began writing poetry and short stories while an undergrad at Paine University, continuing to publish student work while earning an MA at Fisk University and beginning a PhD at the University of Chicago. Yerby left Chicago without finishing his PhD, but his time there gave him more practical experience as a writer; he was hired by the WPA to work on the religious sections of Katherine Dunham’s The Negro in Illinois. He then taught briefly at two HCBUS before deciding that what he really wanted to do was write, not teach, and took a job at an auto plant so he would have more time to write after hours.
At first Yerby seemed to be following the social realist path of so many other young authors in the 1930’s. He wrote a protest novel, This is My Own, about a steelworker/boxer/defense worker, and tried diligently to get it published. Although I haven’t been able to track down a copy, this may well have been as much due to bad timing as anything else; what might well have found an audience during the Great Depression would have looked unpatriotic and out of date during World War II. It almost certainly wasn’t due to the quality of the writing, for an editor at Redbook who saw the manuscript urged him to try again, this time with something shorter.
The result, “Health Card,” was another protest work, this time about the psychological damage racism inflicts on a black soldier whose wife is mistaken for a prostitute by white MP’s, but unlike This is My Own, it sold. Not just to Redbook or one of the then-ubiquitous “little magazines,” on no. “Health Card” appeared in no less than Harper’s, then won the O. Henry Award for Best First Short Story. More short stories about the black experience followed, along with a book contract from the Dial Press, and it looked as if Frank Yerby was on the verge of a truly important career.
There was just one problem: money.
Even in the 1940s, being a writer was not precisely a lucrative way to earn a living, especially if one wrote literary fiction. Add in that that Yerby was black in a white-dominated profession, he had a wife and children to support, and that his first few publications were short stories, and it’s not a surprise that as he later said, “The idea dawned 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.”
And so Yerby stopped writing critically acclaimed short stories and set to work on a brawling, sprawling, novel set in the past that would allow him to comment on social issues while still appealing to enough readers that he would able to earn a living without forcing his family to rely on the 1940s equivalent of what John Scalzi has dubbed “the mandatory Top Ramen diet.”
The result, The Foxes of Harrow, was everything he could have dreamed of. A smash hit from the moment it hit the bookstores, this saga of the antebellum was not only one of the best selling novels of 1946, it was quickly adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara. Even better, it was the first novel by a black author to sell over a million copies, which probably was more than the entire output of the Harlem Renaissance combined.
Best of all? Despite its setting, The Foxes of Harrow managed to avoid all the hideous stereotypes about happy slaves dancing by the levee or fawning over pretty white mistresses that had marred American literature for centuries. Maybe it wasn’t direct social commentary like “Health Card” or This is My Own, but the book was so popular that its depiction of strong, well-developed black characters had an impact on readers who would never pick up a copy of Harper’s.
More novels followed in quick succession, all to solid reviews and excellent sales. The early ones were set in the South, but Yerby began to branch out with 1952’s The Saracen Blade, which was set in the Middle Ages. Soon he’d written books set in colonial America, the Old West, and the early 20th century, with one (Judas, My Brother) centering on one of Christ’s disciples.
Despite this, Yerby returned again and again to the antebellum South. He even wrote a pre-Roots novel about an enslaved African prince, 1971’s The Dahomean, which combined a strong racial message along with his usual excellent historical research and practiced sense of plotting. Nearly twenty years after the O. Henry Award and The Foxes of Harrow, it was clear that Frank Yerby still had that early spark.
By every single criterion, Frank Yerby was one of the great successes of his day.
Alas, this came at a cost. America was still a deeply racist country, and that included some of the readers who snapped up his books and watched the film adaptations. Being a best selling author did not protect Yerby from Jim Crow or the thousand microaggressions that plagued black Americans, even the best and brightest, and by the early 1950s he decided he’d had enough. His marriage was falling apart, and by the mid-1950s he was not only divorced but had moved permanently to Spain. No one there cared about his racial background, only that he was a wealthy American author, and soon he’d remarried to a local woman who remained his partner until his death thirty-five years later.
Yerby’s career was also marred by attacks from black critics who accused him of avoiding America’s racial problems by writing escapist trash instead of big, bold, hard-hitting books that would tackle racism head-on. That he’d tried that before turning to historical fiction, and that his books were among the very few popular novels that avoided racial stereotyping, did not seem to register. He wasn’t writing about the black experience in an acceptable way, and that would not do.
The complaints seem to have died down after The Dahomean, but what should have been his masterpiece was overshadowed by the blockbuster success of Alex Haley’s Roots a few years later. I haven’t been able to find out if Haley, whose research was suspect and who seemed to have cribbed at least some of Roots from other novels, was partially inspired by The Dahomean – he seems to have relied more on white author Harold Courlander’s The African, which is ironic to say the least – but it wouldn’t surprise me. Yerby was still popular in the early 1970s, and it’s likely that Haley was at least aware of his work.
Frank Yerby continued to write and publish until well into the 1980s. His later books were not as popular as his 1940s and 1950’s bestsellers, but that could be as much due to the ascendance of political thrillers and sexy stories about sexy businessmen having sex as to Yerby himself. By the time he died in 1991, he’d sold over fifty million books, which is probably still a record for a black author who isn’t named Alex Haley, even if younger readers were leaving his work to their saga-loving grandmothers. Whether due to changing tastes, the vague perception that historical fiction is not quite literature, or the accusations that Frank Yerby wasn’t doing enough to combat racist, his work is largely out of print and all but forgotten.
This seems to be changing, at least to a certain extent. Yerby was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2006, the Augusta Literary Festival named an award after him in 2013, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an admiring article in 2012 about the positive impact Yerby’s books had a young reader who could have taken a very different path. There’s even a Frank Yerby historical marker in his birth city, erected in 2023.
Fame, fortune, and possibly the literary attention he deserved all along...maybe it’s time for a Frank Yerby revival. Readers owe it to themselves to pick up a copy of The Saracen Blade or A Woman Called Fancy and see for themselves.
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Have you ever read a Frank Yerby novel? Do you like historical fiction? Did your parents have a copy of The Foxes of Harrow or Bride of Liberty shelved in their knotty pine rumpus room? It’s a steamy night at the Last Homely Shack East of the Manhan, so pour yourself a cold one and share….
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