Unseen Genius West Philly author Fran Ross published a novel in 1974 that the world ignored. Now, she’s a literary force. Unseen Genius West Philly author Fran Ross published a novel in 1974 that the world ignored. Now, she’s a literary force. Heroines don’t always show up the way that Fran Ross wrote Oreo. Oreo was cut from an entirely different cloth. While Oreo shares many attributes with Blaxploitation heroines of the era, her quest has nothing to do with rescuing or avenging a boyfriend who’s in trouble or dead, like Sugar Hill or Cleopatra Jones. Her story isn’t fueled by surviving violent trauma like Foxy Brown. Foxy Brown’s rape in that 1974 film, as Morehouse cinema scholar Stephane Dunn has explained, becomes “a metaphor for racial power relations.” Consider the direction that Fran Ross took that same trope in her novel that same year.