US writer. He first gained recognition for his short stories about racial injustice, but
he turned to writing best-selling romantic adventure novels, such as The Foxes of
Harrow (1946).
Born in Augusta, Georgia, he studied at Paine College, gaining a BA in 1937, and Fisk
University, gaining an MA in 1938, and at the graduate level at the University of
Chicago in 1939. He taught English in the South (1939–41), and worked as a
laboratory technician (1941–44), and as chief inspector for Fairchild Aircraft in
Jamaica, New York (1944–45). He lived in Florida in the early 1950s, before settling
in Madrid, Spain, in 1955. The child of a racially mixed couple, he was chided by
some black American critics for not focusing on racial issues, but he did deal with
Africa in The Dahomean: An Historical Novel (1971).