Frank Yerby; Novelist Felt Rejected by His Native South

Frank Yerby, whose novels of the antebellum South sold millions of copies but who left the United States because he said many of his Southern readers found his mixed blood offensive, has died.

The expatriate author, who wrote 32 historical novels, the best known of which was “Foxes of Harrow,” died Nov. 29 of heart failure in Madrid. He was 76.

His wife, translator and researcher, Blanca Calle Perez, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that her husband, who loathed notoriety, had told her to keep his death a secret for at least five weeks.

“He wasn’t well during the last few months, but he refused to go to a doctor,” she said in a telephone interview. “He just kept saying, ‘Let me write in peace’ until the doctor ordered him into the hospital Nov. 28.”

She said her husband suffered a heart attack the next day from which he never recovered.

The Georgia-born writer, who first had his poems published in small magazines when he was 17, moved to Europe in the early 1950s because, as he said in a rare interview several years ago, the United States at that time was “no place for a young man whose list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations.”

Yerby’s first and most popular novel was “Foxes of Harrow,” published in 1946 and made into a 1947 movie starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara, which Yerby said was “one of the worst of all times.”

The novel dealt with a philanderer in early 19th-Century New Orleans who seeks to advance himself by breaking up his marriage. Its portrayal of lust and ambition became a best-seller and a particular favorite of Southern white women who Yerby said later were appalled when they discovered he was not white.

Yerby was put off by the question of race.

“You can call me a racist if you like, because I dislike the human race,” he said during the interview. “But do not call me black. I have more Seminole than Negro blood in me anyway. But when have I ever been referred to as ‘that American Indian author?’ ”

Although Yerby acknowledged that he would be remembered for his more flashy books, his personal favorites were not that successful. They included “The Dahomean,” the critically popular but commercially unsuccessful story of an African prince who is sold into American slavery, and “A Rose for Ana Maria.”

The latter is the haunting story of Spaniards drawn into the Basque separatist movement during the waning years of the Franco regime and was published in 1976, a year after the dictator’s death.

Yerby said he made more money from the German translations of his early works than he did from all his other novels combined. The last, “McKenzie’s Hundred,” a story of a female Confederate spy, was published in 1986 and pushed his total book sales to more than 60 million.

Yerby’s wife said she was the only one present at his burial Nov. 30 in Madrid’s Almudena cemetery.

“He made me promise there wouldn’t be anyone else around,” she said.