This magnificent historical novel, though a first book, remained near the top of the American best-seller lists for no fewer than ten months—a true test of popularity.Set in New Orleans and Louisiana State in the troubled days between 1825 and the Civil War, The Foxes of Harrow has a broad sweep and is charged with colour and action, with white-hot animosities, with strife and warfare and the clash of races. Dominating this fast-moving story is the figure of Stephen Fox, who is loved by three women, who has the face of an angel and the mind which can conjure visions of both beauty and evil.

Jean Paul Marin, the hero of Frank Yerby’s new novel, is as turbulent and unpredictable, as strange a mixture of idealism and hatred, as the French Revolution itself, in the thick of which he lives and loves and pursues his feuds. Four years in the Comte de Gravereau’s private prison have left a scar on his forehead and a deeper invisible one in his heart. Indeed the Comte is to be the baleful genius of Jean’s life. Three women, so utterly different, are caught up in Jean’s passionate career— glamorous, tawny-haired, treacherous Lucienne; Nicole, the Comte’s sister, delicate and blonde, whom Jean loves as much as he hates her brother, and Fleurette, more beautiful than either—beautiful with great calm and sweetness, but blind. Jean, the public figure who rode high on the tide of a revolution he was finally to regret, and became the intimate of Danton himself, and Jean, the private citizen, with his veerings between good and evil, is Mr. Yerby’s masterpiece; fatally easy to love, hard to understand and harder still to forget. The Devil’s Laughter has all the romance and colour which Yerby’s many admirers would expect from the author of the brilliantly successful A Woman Called Fancy and The Foxes of Harrow.

“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.