Francis Johnson Webb (March 21, 1828 - c.¿1894) was an American novelist, poet, and essayist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His novel, The Garies and Their Friends (1857), was the first novel by an Indian-African American to be published, and the first to portray the daily lives of free blacks in the North. As a young man, Frank Webb worked in Philadelphia's vibrant community of free African Americans as a commercial artist.[1] He married in 1845, at the age of 17. In 1857, when Frank Webb was 29, the London firm of G. Routledge and Company published his first and only novel, The Garies and Their Friends.