Yerby was born in
Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916, the second of four children of Rufus Garvin Yerby (1886–1961), a hotel doorman, and Wilhelmina Ethel Yerby (née Smythe) (1888–1960), a teacher. Yerby's ancestry was Black, White, and Native American. Yerby would later refer to himself as "a young man whose list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations." One of Yerby's siblings was
Alonzo Yerby, Associate Dean of the
Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and New York City Hospitals Commissioner. 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. In 1937, he graduated from
Paine College with a B.A. in English, and earned his M.A. in Dramatic Arts from
Fisk University in 1938. He would continue to publish poetry and short stories while he was a student at Paine College and Fisk University. While he was a student at the University of Chicago, he worked for the
Federal Writers' Project, writing about religious groups he observed on the south side of Chicago as part of the social history
The Negro in Illinois under the supervision of the dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist
Katherine Dunham. 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. That manuscript was rejected, but the editor Muriel Fuller of
Redbook encouraged him to send her something else. He sent her the short story "Health Card." She decided it was unsuitable for
Redbook, but she sent it to ''
Harper's'', which published it in 1944. "Health Card" won the prestigious
O. Henry Memorial Prize for best short story. The success of "Health Card" earned Yerby a book contract with Dial Press. The rejection of "This is My Own" caused Yerby to abandon protest literature in favor of historical fiction. ==Novelist==