Yerby's plot construction reveals artistic weakness. Despite his skillful tangling and untangling of exciting narratives which mesmerize even many sophisticated readers, Yerby too often depends on contrived endings. Even more dangerously for a spinner of thrillers, he frequently snarls his plots with digressive essays on customs, language, philosophy, and history.

Such strengths and weaknesses are the trademark of an entertainer…. Surprisingly, however, Yerby's costume novels exhibit another dimension, disregarded by the readers who lament his failure to write an historical novel and by the others who condemn his refusal to write an overtly polemical treatise on the plight of the American Negro. Ideas—bitter ironies, caustic debunkings, painful gropings for meaning—writhe behind the soap-opera facade of his fiction.

Significantly, Frank Yerby, a Georgia-born Negro exile from America, has concentrated on the theme of the outcast who, as in existentialist literature, pits his will against a hostile universe. By intelligence and courage, he proves himself superior to a society which rejects him because of his alien, inferior, or illegitimate birth. (pp. 64-5)

But Yerby discounts the possible amalgamation of certain groups. Regardless of talent, beauty, or wealth, the quadroons of Louisiana remain outcasts…. If, apparently, Frank Yerby sees intermarriage and amalgamation as the ultimate solution to all animosities, but recognizes that some societies prohibit that solution, there is little reason to wonder why he taints his tales with the somber hint that man's life is a joke played by a merciless and senile deity.

Furthermore, despite his avowed respect for his readers' prejudices, Yerby repeatedly has violated his own dictum that a writer should neither preach nor instruct. Driven by emotions which inspired him to write fiction of social protest in his early years, Frank Yerby now writes anti-romantic, existentialist melodrama which is frequently as satirical as Voltaire's Candide. (p. 65)

Yerby inflicts such severe physical and mental tortures upon his protagonists that a thoughtful reader searches for a reason. Although Yerby may have wished merely to gratify his American readers' avidity for sadism or to imitate the bloody, tragic incidents abundant in the dramas of Shakespeare, whom he admired and frequently quoted, another possibility must be considered—that Frank Yerby, who now admits that discrimination compelled his exile, has avenged himself vicariously by punishing his American protagonists who, unrestricted by skin color, can attain the status denied to him. (p. 66)

In addition to maintaining his own disbelief by creating anti-romantic stories, Frank Yerby teaches more than a careless reader would suspect…. [He] has debunked historical myths relentlessly. Perhaps this crusade eventually will be considered Yerby's major contribution to American culture….

Chiefly, of course, he has attacked America, in particular the South. Until recent years this section of America has received literary glorification as a region of culture and gentility. The males reputedly were aristocratic, cultured, brave, and honorable. The females were gentle and chaste. Savagely, Yerby has ridiculed these myths.

The South, he has pointed out, was founded by adventurers, outcasts, and failures who migrated to America because they had nothing to lose; the actual aristocrats, having nothing to gain by emigration, remained on the continent….

Second-generation Americans, Yerby has shown, did not resemble the idealized stereotypes of the myth. (p. 67)

Yerby has charged that even the houses and towns have been idealized in the myth….

Unlike a typical propagandist, however, Yerby has not restricted his attack to one group. He has also castigated Americans above the Mason-Dixon line. (p. 68)

Relentlessly condemning the senselessness of war, Yerby has exploded many myths which glorify heroes and causes. (p. 69)

Yerby is no misanthrope; he has heroes: Thomas Jefferson, who freed his slaves; George Washington, who led American revolutionists heroically despite his incompetence as a military tactician; Henri Christophe, who helped free Haiti from French authority. Moreover, Yerby has struggled to evolve a positive philosophy. Significantly, he has repudiated the patient goodness frequently held before Negroes as a desirable standard. Yerby persists in showing that men succeed and are extolled because they are smarter, stronger, bolder, and braver than other men. Sometimes, they act morally and honorably; more often they do not. But neither their contemporaries nor their descendants evaluate the morality of the successful, the heroes. The minority groups in Yerby's stories suffer because they are ignorant, weak, and cowardly. Foolishly, they beg for help from a deity, which, according to Yerby, if it exists, views mankind hostilely, indifferently, or contemptuously. Life has meaning only when man—frail and insignificant—sparkles as brightly as possible in his instant of eternity. (p. 70)

[Yerby] has not yet demonstrated, however, that he can make a significant theme emerge credibly from the interaction of characters. Unless he does this, the philosophy will stand out as incongruously and as absurdly as a candle on a fallen cake.

It is to be hoped that, questing for the Grail of significance, Yerby will not tarnish his golden luster as an entertaining debunker of historical myths. (p. 71)