The Foxes of Harrow

by Frank Yerby Book 1 in the The Foxes of Harrow series.

First published 1946

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4.0(749)

New Orleans, 1825. Stephen Fox arrives almost penniless but with the nerve and calculation of a professional gambler. He challenges Louisiana’s entrenched planter caste, accumulates land and wealth, and builds Harrow into a great plantation. His marriage to Odalie Arceneaux, his relationship with her sister Aurore, and his long attachment to Désirée bind his private ambitions to a household divided by race, legitimacy and inheritance.
The novel follows Harrow from its creation toward the Civil War, making slavery and the rigid racial hierarchy of the antebellum Mississippi Valley part of the structure that enables Fox’s ascent. Yerby treats plantation grandeur as inseparable from exploitation and unstable family relationships, so the looming war threatens not only property and political power but the social order Stephen has spent decades mastering.