author
Frank J. Webb
1828–1894
Best known for a groundbreaking 1857 novel, this Philadelphia writer brought the lives of free Black communities in the North into American fiction with unusual immediacy. His work was praised in its day by Harriet Beecher Stowe and has since been recognized as an early landmark in African American literature.
1 Audiobook
The Garies and Their Friends
by Frank J. Webb
About the author
Born in Philadelphia in 1828, Frank J. Webb was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. He is remembered above all for The Garies and Their Friends (1857), widely noted as the second novel published by an African American writer and the first to portray the everyday lives of free Black people in the North.
Webb and his wife, Mary E. Webb, spent time in Britain in the 1850s, where his novel was published with a preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although only one novel is securely associated with him today, that book has had a long afterlife because of its sharp picture of race, class, and city life in antebellum Philadelphia.
Much about Webb's life remains only lightly documented, but reliable reference sources describe him not just as a novelist, but also as a poet, essayist, newspaperman, and educator. He died in 1894, leaving behind a small body of work with an influence far larger than its size.