As the facilitator of connections between writers and publishers and emulating his mentor James Weldon Johnson, White himself tried writing.  His first novel, Fire in the Flint, tried to combine his presentation of the plight of African Americans with the novel. In the novel Kenneth Harper a southern born but northern trained African American physician returns from World War I to start a medical clinic and practice in southern Georgia.  He is flush from his good treatment by whites in the north and in European so he expects such treatment in the south.  His brother warns him but he soon learns that southern white treatment for "negroes" will not allow him to set up the clinic for all that he wants to.  The novel is the story of his slow downfall as he finds out that even sympathetic whites will not challenge the racism of their colleagues, runs afoul of the Ku Klux Klan, has his brother lynched and his sister raped by white men.  He ends being lynched himself while killing some whites in the process. The novel was published in 1923 and met with some success. He tried unsuccessfully to have the novel turned into a play or movie. He published a second novel, Flight, in 1926 which was much less successful. He was awarded a Guggenheim grant in 1927 and went to France to write a third book, Rope and Faggot, which was a non fiction study of the psycho-sexual and cultural forces behind the southern horror of lynching.  He started and never completed a third novel BlackJack.

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