Taylor Caldwell Summary

Critical Essay by George Dangerfield The armaments industry is a subject which fiction does well to take up; and Mrs. Caldwell's attack [in Dynasty of Death] is handled with the patience and s... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard A. Cordell Taylor Caldwell's long, turbulent narratives—one appears every year with the regularity of the almanac or year-book—are very much alike. From... Read more

Critical Essay by William Soskin Taylor Caldwell realizes full well the limitations and stupidities of her Melissa [the heroine of Caldwell's "Melissa"], daughter of a philosophi... Read more

Critical Essay by Riley Hughes Up to now Miss Caldwell has been in the habit of simplifying the past, of building her plot and bullying her characters around one idea…. In The Devil's A... Read more

Critical Essay by Harrison Smith [Taylor Caldwell] has pursued through sixteen novels almost every aspect of the rise of those multi-millionaire families in the United States Theodore Roosevelt calle... Read more

Critical Essay by Virginia Kirkus' Service In choosing to put emphasis on the early life of Luke the physician, Taylor Caldwell has presented [in Dear and Glorious Physician] quite a different... Read more

Critical Essay by Caroline Tunstall St. Luke, author of the third Gospel and of the Acts, was with St. Paul in Rome and is referred to by him as "the beloved physician." According to tr... Read more

Critical Essay by Riley Hughes On page 572 (the final page) [of Dear and Glorious Physician] Miss Caldwell adds this sentence (in parentheses) after her own final sentence of the novel: "Conti... Read more

Critical Essay by Riley Hughes The Listener is not exactly a novel; it is rather a series of related episodes or tales held together by a slender string of place. The protagonists of these episodes c... Read more

Critical Essay by Annette T. Rottenberg The natural perversity of students can sometimes be turned to good account, as when a student asks (apropos of a discussion about reading habits), "But ... Read more

Critical Essay by William B. Hill [A Pillar of Iron is an] astonishingly powerful novel based on the life of Cicero. Miss Caldwell obviously admires the great orator, practically making him a pre-Chr... Read more

Critical Essay by Harold Strauss ["The Eagles Gather"] continues the saga of the Bouchard family, the great armaments clan whose fortunes were first set forth in "Dynasty of Deat... Read more

Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly No question, [Taylor Caldwell] … can tell an engrossing story. She proves it once again in ["Captains and the Kings," a] gigantic novel about ... Read more

Critical Essay by Best Sellers Big, wordy, sprawling, ["Captains and the Kings"] is probably a thesis novel; there is some loose association with the Kennedy family, though in this inst... Read more

Critical Essay by Martin Levin "But you can't marry me! You are—Jeremy Porter—a rich man and a lawyer, and I am only a servant girl!" So says Ellen Watson, a beauti... Read more

Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly The prolific and best selling Caldwell collaborates with [Jess Stearn in I, Judas], retelling the Judas Iscariot story from an angle that's unusual if not n... Read more

Critical Essay by Pat Gold [Taylor Caldwell's Bright Flows the River] is anti-establishment, anti-feminist, anti-democracy, anti-family, anti-power, anti-duty, and in fact anti almost everythi... Read more

Critical Essay by Anne Marie Stamford After thirty-two novels it's good to see that Taylor Caldwell hasn't lost her touch. Her superb style of storytelling turns the ordinary theme of B... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Freedman Taylor Caldwell is a shining exemplar of Grey Power, still churning out highly successful novels in which she loftily pretends the 20th century—at least in f... Read more

Critical Essay by Clifton Fadiman Taylor Caldwell's "The Earth Is the Lord's" … reminds one less of a novel than it does of a particularly grandiloquent opera. All ... Read more

Critical Essay by Herbert Gorman While "The Arm and the Darkness" by Taylor Caldwell is primarily a long narrative of the physical and spiritual struggles of a young nobleman during the... Read more