...little did I know about Frank Yerby...

I have been a fan of the book The Golden Hawk (1948) since I started taking a real liking to reading when I had just turned 11.  The story is thrilling - following the exploits of a privateer, Kit Gerado and his father figure, Bernardo, as they fight aristocracy, lust for riches and falling for women from Cartagena to Spain.  My copy is one of the old originals from Dial Press, NY.  It has a wonderful map in the front endpaper, with a cacophony of almost unrelated graphics, probably culled from other sources by the binder.  It's yellowing more today, with a large bite at the bottom of its the spine.  (It twas not I.)

The tale is heavily reminiscent of the swashbuckling genre from Hollywood in the late thirties/early forties.  The style relies upon the baroque language of a Reader's Digest, but in a fashion that, for me, at 11, was full of overabundance of breathy bosoms and swordplay.  Even today, I enjoy the exuberance of Yerby's early work.  It will remind you of the romance stories you'll find in Wal Mart today: torn dresses, musculature that is described in painstaking detail...

"The dress was caught about her waist and clung like the clasp of a lover; at one and the same time it shielded and flaunted the proud upflare of her full, young breasts; from her waist it arched down like the inverted bell of a black orchid plucked in a dream garden in a season of fevers and delirium." [92]

That's just a random sample.  The language is best taken in spurts, but, overall, it is a raucous tale.  For a young one, it was an early form of acceptable pr0n. :)  (Although I had access to a copy of Coffee, Tea or Me? http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Uninhibited-Memoirs-Airline-Stewardesses/dp/0142003514.  Man, was I a naughty kid - only knowing half of what was going on in that book.)

What struck me today, having never looked up the author - I assumed that, by the style and its exhaustive descriptions of fair-skinned women - Frank Yerby is a black author [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Yerby].  My surprise was that, being it was written in '48, and my experience with black literature was a much different experience than something that I had read as a child.  Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Walker were my primary relationship.  Tooling around wikipedia, I found that Yerby was the first African-American author to become a millionaire from the pen, and the first to sell a book to Hollywood (Foxes).  He was at odds with the segregationist culture of the US and finally moved on to Spain.  He would eventually die there.  (It must have been his passion to be there.  In the Hawk, he describes Spain with such vivid asides, he must have found a place that resolved his passion.)

The anachronism is what threw me off tonight - he wrote such splendid 'costume' pieces.  He even stated this was the sole purpose of entertainment.  Considering the time period in which Yerby lived, that was a fascinating  act.

You could pick a copy up for a few bucks at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Hawk-Frank-Yerby/dp/B001KUVJA4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314949393&sr=1-1.