Esther Forbes Summary

While Esther Forbes was primarily a writer of adult historical fiction, her two attempts at writing for children. Johnny Tremain (1943) and America's Paul Revere (1948), have won universal critical ac... Read more

Critical Essay by Anne Parrish ["O Genteel Lady!"] is the strange story of Lanice Bardeen, beautiful bluestocking of the Boston of Holmes, Emerson and the Alcotts. No one else in the bo... Read more

Critical Essay by Allen French [Paul Revere and the World He Lived In] is a novelist's biography, but it is (thank Heaven!) not fictionized, nor yet (more thanks!) dramatized. But the historia... Read more

Critical Essay by Edward Weeks To her books Miss Forbes brings a deep and delving delight in the past, a feeling for the New England character by turns shrewd and romantic, and the pepper and salt of... Read more

Critical Essay by Edith Olivier [In "A Mirror for Witches" is found] that deep, tragic irony which culminates in St. John's Gospel, in the creations of the Greek dramatists, in T... Read more

Critical Essay by Diana Trilling "The Running of the Tide" is so clearly a pot-boiler—and this despite Miss Forbes's reputation as a historian—that it really should... Read more

Critical Essay by Henry Commager Miss Forbes is in love with New England, and ["Rainbow on the Road"] is her confession and her declaration. It is, to be sure, about New England of a ce... Read more

Critical Essay by Kenneth B. Murdock [Paradise] cracks the moulds in which too many historical novels of early New England have been cast. [Miss Forbes] has written the story of a seventeenth-century... Read more

Critical Essay by William Soskin New England is traditionally the home place of the American humanists, the American conscience troubled by its appetites, heckled by its morality, crucified by its in... Read more

Critical Essay by Carl Van Doren Not every historical novelist can write a good biography, but the right kind of historical novelist has some of the qualities most needed in a good biographer. Esther... Read more

Critical Essay by James Truslow Adams Revere has been one of the best known legendary heroes of our country, embedded in the customary errors of [Long-fellow's poem]. As Esther Forbes …... Read more