For all Yerby's protestations about the inappropriateness of social protest as "stuff" for literature, it is difficult to say that he is oblivious to the fact that his writing reflects his world view, his thoughts and even his neuroses. He most certainly protests but about different matters.

Often compared to William Faulkner in terms of popularity and volume but not in terms of stature or literary merit, Yerby, like Faulkner, has created a world in which the order in people's lives has been disrupted. And one gets the feeling that, like Faulkner, Yerby is not especially fond of people, that he has carved for himself a place among his heroes and anti-heroes. (pp. 89, 91)

What has fascinated readers and critics through the years of Yerby's career has been his insistence upon giving us an objective picture. His castigation of the South is, of course, unyielding. White Southerners are bad not because they believed in slavery but because they sustained the pretentiousness of being a virtuous, cultured aristocracy when in fact they were guileful, indolent and degenerate…. Blacks were no better because they were treacherous, complacent and made "such good slaves," came another of Yerby's pungent remarks.

The Yerby world is therefore one in which the ancestors, both Black and white, live in the present. The legendary South is exchanged for Yerby's South, a microcosm where evil, guilt, defeat, and social, political and economic frustration lurk supreme among mankind. Even in the novels not about the South, little is changed except the geography….

[It] is possible that Yerby's potboilers were not just hurling anger at the South and America; that his anti-heroes, despite their strengths and intelligence, had been too close to the diseased and morally decadent environment to be able to come out untarnished; that all of man's legends and myths, which he creates to sustain himself in this world, don't mean a thing ultimately in this world or the next, which Yerby doesn't believe exists. It is possible that all noble efforts result in defeat. In short, it is suffering that gives man a profound sense of the evil that envelops good and bad alike. (p. 92)