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 Forbes is that kind of novelist, and her biography of Paul Revere ["Paul Revere and the World He Lived In"] takes at once a high and lasting place in American literature. Miss Forbes credits her mother, Harriette M. Forbes, with doing "most of the work on the original papers, court records, deeds, etc., newspapers, manuscr...

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. As if plotted upon a sine wave, the story must soar to a lush bit of four-poster ecstasy every fifteen pages, and plummet in the interstices into violence and cruelty. It is therefore something of a relief to come upon a tale [such as The Running of the Tide] which does not rely upon such gaudy devices at all. Miss Forbes approaches her task an...

["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 book matters much, although there are many characters. But Lanice lives, and her life is shown us with honesty and rather bitter laughter. Esther Forbes is able to keep her characters in costume without letting the costumes smother the characters. The book is brilliant with color. You really see picture after picture—the ladies of fashio...

[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 Thomas Hardy. [Esther Forbes's] story has that human poignancy which tears the heart in the account of those witches who really were done to death at Salem, and as one reads "A Mirror for Witches" one feels stream over one the force of that same evil, reasonless torrent. The scene is set "upon the skirts of Cowan Cor...

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 present assumes must have been there. In the ordinary historical novel a character visiting the Salem custom house about 1845 or thereabouts, and finding the surveyor of the port a youngish, shy man, "handsome with his mane of heavy hair and the dark eyes, half-melancholy and half amused," would be certain to recognize Nathaniel Hawtho...

[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 Boyd's "Long Hunt" in this class, and now there is another one: Esther Forbes's new book, "The General's Lady." To my way of thinking books like these express the essence of what historical writing should be. It is easy enough to snatch episodes out of history and string them on a heroic line, but it ...

["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 did earn his every casual supper, he was never in the least averse to singing for it, too. He does so in a taproom largesse of tales, true and fabricated, rendered in a manner to enliven anybody but some old tract-reading deacon or surly band of pig drovers. For he was by disposition a kind of traveling harlequin—and is as easy and entert...

[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 Massachusetts Bay family with the emphasis on flesh and blood, not on an artificially contrived system; on drinking, eating, breeding, not on pious meditation; and on the dramatic struggle of white man and Indian, ending bitterly in war, not on the tamer operations of religious zealots…. To be sure there are ghosts of the old lay figures in...

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 intelligence. Its stern Puritan fathers have never successfully concealed the essential physical yearnings and the lusts which made begetting patriarchs of them and scandalous males, even as they erected their picket fences of respectable morality and visited Old Testament wrath upon unconventional sinners, witches and adulterers…. [Rarely...

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 … says, the legend was to swallow the actual man. It has been her task [in Paul Revere and the World He Lived In] to bring the real man to life, and to paint his portrait against the background of his times. The original material for the purpose has apparently not been excessive, but it has been sufficient, and the author has evidently gone through i...

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 century ago, but much of it is familiar, both the appearance and the character. This view of New England is a welcome change from current fashion—early autumns or desire under the elms or last puritans or George Apleys—and it is a long time since we have had a book that delighted in the granite ledges and the noisy brooks and the li...

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 bring him to life as he was, and he is solid, human, and refreshing. Esther Forbes has done well by Paul Revere [in Paul Revere and the World He Lived In]—the actual Revere, a Boston workman of French descent, cool, canny, successful, the husband of two wives and the father of sixteen children, loving his home and the skill he wrought wi...

The mood of Esther Forbes's charming novel "Rainbow on the Road" is that of a sunlit summer day, variegated with thunderstorms which pass quickly, leaving behind them an even brighter landscape…. Mrs. Forbes uses not sex—there never was a purer book—or dagger to lure the reader from page to page, but relies on a skill which most modern historical novelists seem to regard as secondary, on literary style, on the ability to evoke the wonders of everyday living. In bril...

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 integration between character and environment which is responsible for the living quality of ["Paradise"]. Period color is not permitted to dwarf individuals, and the family of Jude Parre loom larger than their setting. What is more important, and certainly more rare, they act, feel, think like children of their age. As with Hawthorne...

[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's weighing of evidence, the giving of reasons for decisions, the noting of sources, are mostly lacking. (p. 521) Even so, the facts were thoroughly assimilated, and the skill of the practised novelist makes for brisk movement and color. The double title of the book represents the two tasks which the author set herself. She has carrie...

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 everyday living which she translates so accurately into another century. The Running of the Tide is the story of Salem in the early 1800's when the ships bound out of the skimpy, silted harbor (no vessel larger than four hundred tons could get into it), in their trade with Russia, the West Indies, China, and India, were making it the ...

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 sharply and judicially [in "Paul Revere and the World He Lived In"], with the novelist's eye for idiosyncrasy. The daily habit of life—business, political, domestic, and social—is admirably recreated. Miss Forbes occasionally permits herself the luxury of too much detail. It appears to be a fault of the novelist ...

"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 not be reviewed at all in a serious magazine. In fact, I had already set it aside, when I saw it written about on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as if it were a major artistic achievement. While it may not be entirely fair to submit an author to harsh judgment in one periodical just because she was unduly praised in another, ...

["The Boston Book"] is a rarely delightful picture book. Here is the Boston Bostonians dream they live in, the Hurleyless, Curleyless, Tobinless Boston, where the Common is not littered with last night's newspapers, where the street cleaners do not wait for spring rains and the native Yankee has not fled to the suburbs. It is the Boston of hills and crooked streets, of Peter Faneuil and the Adamses. Boston down to Dr. Holmes, with only touches on the age of Koussevitzky, baseball and th...