Floodtide

by Frank Yerby

First published 1950

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3.6(147)

Ross Pary is born in poverty at Natchez-Under-the-Hill and grows up looking toward the planter mansions above him as symbols of everything he intends to win. His climb toward acceptance and wealth is complicated by tangled relationships and by a love that draws him toward Cuba, expanding his ambitions beyond the Mississippi River world that formed him.
Set in the decade before the Civil War, Floodtide presents a slaveholding South reaching for new wealth and influence even as its political future narrows. Yerby connects Natchez society to wider schemes for expansion and an overseas slave empire, allowing Ross’s personal hunger for rank to mirror a regional order trying to extend itself at the moment when sectional conflict is approaching crisis.