Benton's Row

Product Description

This history of a pioneering Southern family unfolds in this story of triumph and tragedy. In 1842, Tom Benton gallopes in the Red River Valley, one jump ahead of a Texas posse bent on hanging him. He feared no living thing. He loved danger and laughed at the impossible. He stole his wife from her husband, his land from its legal owner. Not content with lusty Sarah, he took a knife-slinging Cajun's daughter for a mistress. From the day Tom Benton arrived into Louisiana, he and her family ruled the bayou country.

Tom sired three children. A daughter, Stormy, as wild and willful as himself. Wade, who inherited all of his father's weakness and none of his strength. And a second son not even Tom dared claim as his own -- a boy who one day would bring destruction and misery to the Benton clan. Devil's spawn they all were. Stormy ran away to the glittering life of a courtesan. Wade delivered his father over to the one man who could kill him. And in Benton's Row people watched, horrified, fascinated, and whispered -- “Every time a damned Benton is born, people should run for cover!”

In 1920 his wife Sarah, aged ninety-seven, dies peacefully in her rocker on the veranda of Tom Benton’s sprawling plantation known as Broad Acres, nestled in the exotic and mysterious Louisiana river country. This is a spellbinding story of four brawling generations of Bentons, a family that comes to a violent end caused by its own illicit Negro branch. 

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About the Author

Born in Augusta, Georgia to Rufus Garvin Yerby, an African American, and Wilhelmina Smythe, who was caucasian. He graduated from Haines Normal Institute in Augusta and graduated from Paine College in 1937. Thereafter, Yerby enrolled in Fisk University where he received his Master's degree in 1938. In 1939, Yerby entered the University of Chicago to work toward his doctorate but later left the university. Yerby taught briefly at Florida A&M University and at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

Frank Yerby rose to fame as a writer of popular fiction tinged with a distinctive southern flavor. In 1946 he became the first African-American to publish a best-seller with The Foxes of Harrow. That same year he also became the first African-American to have a book purchased for screen adaptation by a Hollywood studio, when 20th Century Fox optioned Foxes. Ultimately the book became a 1947 Oscar-nominated film starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara. Yerby was originally noted for writing romance novels set in the Antebellum South. In mid-century he embarked on a series of best-selling novels ranging from the Athens of Pericles to Europe in the Dark Ages. Yerby took considerable pains in research, and often footnoted his historical novels. In all he wrote 33 novels.