Benton's Row

“IN the past twenty years English curiosity about the Deep South has been rightly sated by American novelists, and to many readers the description of Mr Frank Yerby’s new work of fiction as ‘a four-generation novel about the South’ may act as a sharp deterrent. More kindly Negroes, more camellias, more gracious living in Grecian Mansions, more Spanish moss? Here they will be wrong . . . The South of Mr Yerby in this lengthy novel, stretching from 1843 to 1920 and covering the singular misfortunes of the Benton family during this extensive period of time, rings a very authentic note . . . But apart from a wealth of suggestive fact to be gleaned by reading Benton’s Row, and even apart from the tumultuous succession of incidents of love, sex, violence, more violence, murder and sudden death, this novel raises wider and more disturbing issues for the critic . . . How . . . are we to explain why it is so hard to put Benton’s Row down? A best-seller who has since 1946 sold more than twelve million copies of his novels in the United States alone, Mr Yerby perfectly understands the mixture of episode needed to keep alive interest in a tale . . . He believes in his characters’ sentiments, as well as in their sentimentality, he believes in their bouts of violence; and by doing so he carries us panting along behind him, so that we believe in it too.”The Times Frank Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1916. He studied at Fisk University in Tennessee and at the University of Chicago where he gained his M.A. degree. During the war he wrote his first novel and has since had twenty-three others published. He now lives in Spain.