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...
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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 boo...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Leech
Because [Miss Forbes] is a novelist, she is interested in character. British redcoats and Boston tories, James Otis and Sam Adams and John Hancock, are delineated shar...
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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 historian...
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Critical Essay by Ellery Sedgwick
["The Boston Book"] is a rarely delightful picture book. Here is the Boston Bostonians dream they live in, the Hurleyless, Curleyless, Tobinless Boston,...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Carl Van Doren
Most historical novels are nothing if they are not historical—and they are not historical. In particular, they have a way of finding in the past what the presen...
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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 Th...
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Critical Essay by Alexander Laing
The historical novel, latterly, has come to depend more and more upon the old picaresque formula which had, in its origins, nothing in particular to do with history. ...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by James Thomas Flexner
The mood of Esther Forbes's charming novel "Rainbow on the Road" is that of a sunlit summer day, variegated with thunderstorms which pass qu...
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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 cen...
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Critical Essay by Frances Gaither
["Rainbow on the Road"] concerns an itinerant painter who found his craft so little humdrum, so zestful in daily practice, that, although he could and d...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Edith H. Walton
Unlike so many historical novelists, who either overstress background or are content to use it as a pretty costume device, Miss Forbes has achieved a balance, an inte...
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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 int...
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Critical Essay by Walter D. Edmonds
[Once in a great while] a book appears that so fuses history and the life of its protagonists that it makes a class of its own. In recent years I think of James Boy...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Burke Boyce
Paul Revere has not left us many words. He was an artisan, not a philosopher; a creator, not a talker. But the words he has left are enough, in sympathetic hands, to brin...
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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 … ...
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Esther Forbes
