Author: Frank J. Webb

Frank J. Webb (1828-1894) was an African American novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in Philadelphia to a family of free Black people, Webb was the maternal grandson of former Vice President Aaron Burr. His parents settled in Philadelphia after fleeing the United States for several years in an attempt to emigrate to the Republic of Haiti. His father, who died only a year after his birth, was an elder in the First African Presbyterian Church, while his mother, the illegitimate daughter of Burr, came from a family of prominent activists. Webb found success as a commercial artist, marrying Mary Espartero—an actor and orator—in 1845. In 1857, he published his first and only novel, The Garies and Their Friends, with the help of Lady Noel Byron and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Two years later, while in Jamaica, Mary Webb succumbed to illness following a lengthy international tour. Webb eventually remarried, returning to the United States with Mary Rosabelle Rodgers in 1869. Settling in Washington, DC, Webb found work publishing essays, poems, and novellas in The New Era, a prominent African American literary journal run by Frederick Douglass. He spent the last decade of his life in Galveston, Texas, where he served as a delegate to the Republican state convention and worked as a newspaper editor and principal of the Barnes Institute.