The Foxes of Harrow -- Frank Yerby

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Condition : Good.

        Reprint, Heinemann, 1949, Hardback - Historical Fiction - 447 pp. Name of previous owner inside.

         " Frank Yerby was one of the most prolific and financially successful African-American writers in history. Fifty-five million copies of his books have sold worldwide and he wrote more than thirty novels.

         The circumstances surrounding publication of The Foxes of Harrow read like a potboiler: the young impoverished author struggles against the odds and ultimately proves successful thanks to a combination of perseverance and luck. His attempts to sell his own protest fiction failed because he portrayed successful black men, defying conventions of what had become an entrenched genre. Publishers expressed little interest in uplifting narratives and favored books by that dealt overtly with the injustices of a system rigged against blacks. Yerby's luck changed when he moved to New York and met Helen Strauss, an agent looking for young clients. Strauss won him an audience at Dial Press and his first assignment grew into Foxes. The novel made Yerby wealthy overnight -- Dial sold two million copies in three years -- and Twentieth Century Fox bought film rights for a sensational $150,000.

        Genre snobbery risks brushing aside his significant accomplishments in the publishing industry, and ignores the way race actually operates in his books. In the case of The Foxes of Harrow, Yerby's ability to work, find success within the literary establishment, and to find flexibility to embed racial themes in a sprawling plot, allowed him to reach far more readers than many of his contemporaries. When it comes to questions of African-American canon formation, Yerby remains on the outside because of his refusal to bend to the rules of literary production imposed on black authors. But his own work demonstrates a facility to operate within the terrain of the publishing industry -- to sell his work to readers and to Hollywood. His work deserves our attention precisely because of its own brand of effective and subtle protest." - Bookslut

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