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 isn't it necessary to read bad books in order to recognize good ones?" and the teacher replies, "Yes, it is." The attempt to implement this proposition can be unexpectedly rewarding. My own experience grew out of a class in American Literature since the Civil War, which had just concluded a study of The American and "...

Until about three quarters of the way through [Captains and the Kings] I more or less knew what I should be writing about. Now I am not so sure. It seemed to be one of those capacious dramatic tales of the American dollar dream in the tradition of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane. 'Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through the dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850's and he was a penni...

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 conflicts between the Catholic reaction and the Huguenots in France in the time of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, it is also an adumbration of the emergence of the Common Man into history and his opening battles for liberty, enlightenment and justice. The real villain of this novel is the corrupt hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and ...

If critics took the author of "Never Victorious, Never Defeated" as seriously as she takes herself, articles would have long since appeared on "The World of Taylor Caldwell." Fourteen of the sixteen novels she has published in less than two decades portray important aspects of American life in the period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, most of them concerned with families of great wealth and power. Three of the novels, beginning with "Dynasty...

[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 everything save the right and the need of the individual to make the correct choice and philosophy of a way of life that is not counter to his very basic, personal tenets. Caldwell's prose is, most of the time, majestic and almost poetic. The characters, mostly men and four or five of the women, who she has peopled this—her thirty-s...

["The Eagles Gather"] continues the saga of the Bouchard family, the great armaments clan whose fortunes were first set forth in "Dynasty of Death." The Bouchards are ruthless, self-willed men, and their women are pawns of their overweening lust for power. One recalls how, in the earlier novel, the Bouchards together with the Barbours founded a small powder and arms factory in Pennsylvania in the middle of the last century. One recalls how they gradually outstripped and extermina...

Taylor Caldwell realizes full well the limitations and stupidities of her Melissa [the heroine of Caldwell's "Melissa"], daughter of a philosophic writer who has deliberately made a mess of her out of his villainous desire to dominate her and make her subject to his psychologically poisonous whims. But the author never intended that we should become painfully bored and irritated with the beautiful creature; and that miscarriage of Taylor Caldwell's purpose must be attributed to t...

Taylor Caldwell's "The Earth Is the Lord's" … reminds one less of a novel than it does of a particularly grandiloquent opera. All the characters talk in a kind of recitative, the psychology is always grand to the point of inflation, and all the action seems to be accompanied by full orchestra, with percussion instruments dominating. The net effect, too, is operatic, for you feel that while all this blood and thunder verges on the silly, it never really is silly but, on the...

[In] "The Wide House" Miss Caldwell has begun to question her formula. She has discovered that "a man might find some kindliness ∗ ∗ ∗ in men who were avowedly rascals ∗ ∗ ∗ and find nothing but mercilessness ∗ ∗ ∗ in those who had the approval of God." But though she has given the matter some thought, her old habits persist. When the curtain rises on the buzzing young town of Grandeville, N.Y., in the Eighteen Fiftie...

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 skill of a prosecuting attorney. In order to establish her case she builds up a careful background, introducing a number of facts and side-issues which a defense attorney would probably characterize—and an impartial judge perhaps disallow—as irrelevant, incompetent, and all the rest of it. But when the whole picture is complete, you ha...

For the background of her new novel, "The Strong City," Taylor Caldwell has chosen the town of "Nazareth," Pa., and the steel industry as it was during the latter years of the past century. That was the time when men worked twelve hours a day six days a week, when unions were struggling for existence and many employers regarded the "Knights of Labor" with considerable disfavor and even more suspicion. Immigrants were then swarming into the United States, and it is f...

Will "There Was a Time" cause a rift between Taylor Caldwell and her everloving public? Will that public … mind that she has slapped their wrists in this semi-autobiographical novel about a young writer who forsakes thunderous chronicles of villainous financiers to write from his heart? The answer to these questions must be a resounding no…. Miss Caldwell's desertion of the titans who stomp through her previous output has in no wise affected her approach or her proseȁ...

The collaboration of Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stearn on their second novel, I, Judas, has resulted in an exceptionally interesting work…. Judas is depicted not as a poor thief, but as the educated son of a wealthy aristocrat. He sacrificed a large inheritance to follow Christ. We learn from Judas' actions that he is somewhat of an elitist, as he speaks of "another bleak Galilean fishing village with country clods in evidence wherever we went," a chauvinist, "for anybody wh...

A conversation with the Devil presents a fairly obvious literary temptation, especially perhaps to a Christian, but to anyone who plans to discuss the painful evil of the modern world, its false values or its misdirected aims, C. S. Lewis comes immediately to mind. He knew that the Devil himself would be difficult to catch, so very cleverly he avoided the problem by composing a series of letters from one of Hell's staff to a junior Tempter on his first assignment in the world…. [In Dialogues w...

It is impossible to read anything of Taylor Caldwell's without being reminded of the old gag, "He don't sing good, but he sings loud." Miss Caldwell doesn't write well, to be sure—but her books are infused with a sort of wild, anything-goes vitality which can hardly be ascribed to Henry James. Not that "The Sound of Thunder" is a good book. It isn't. But Miss Caldwell has managed to stay sufficiently within the bounds of educated standards to ma...

Taylor Caldwell is an angry woman. She tells us so in a candid foreword to her curious new novel ["The Listener"]. Man does not need a new religion, she says. He does not require better bombs and missiles. He does not have to travel to the moon. What he really needs is someone to listen to his hurts and bewilderments. Of course, that Someone is the not very mysterious "Listener" of her book. The role of "The Listener" is dramatized in fifteen chapters that successiv...

["Dynasty of Death" and its recently-published sequel, "The Eagles Gather,"] have the same theine—the titanic struggle between ruthlessness, greed, opportunism, selfishness, and dishonesty on the one side (the munitions barons blandly lump together all such practices as "realism"), and altruism, justice, love, and self-sacrifice on the other side. The victor in this internecine war is not announced, for the war is still raging—perhaps more fiercely tod...

[Taylor Caldwell] has pursued through sixteen novels almost every aspect of the rise of those multi-millionaire families in the United States Theodore Roosevelt called malefactors of great wealth. The fact that her great-uncle once owned all of the railroads in Scotland and that her grandmother was half Irish has had a great deal to do with the subject of her newest book, "Never Victorious, Never Defeated." This long and absorbing novel is by no means a pursuit of a wornout vein; the author ha...

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 come to a sanctuary built through the aid of a bequest left by the lawyer John Godfrey. Some are scoffing and defiant; others are hurt and humble; all are seeking peace. Some push the button which opens the curtains to reveal "The Man Who Listens" patiently. Others tell their story without caring to learn the identity of the man....

Taylor Caldwell's long, turbulent narratives—one appears every year with the regularity of the almanac or year-book—are very much alike. From "Dynasty of Death" (1938) down to [her new novel "This Side of Innocence"] the ingredients vary only slightly; a family or two of wealth and power, most of their members despising one another and engaging in callous and unscrupulous business enterprise; intra-family love duels; intimate details of high finance and indus...

Although there's no dearth here of Caldwell's portable sermonettes on such evils as soft living, [Answer As a Man, a] turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania tale of rags to riches and love tangles, has the ease and zip of the author's earlier period. The hero and true M-A-N of the title is Jason Garrity, only approved kin of his grandfather, Bernard. Bernard is another true M-A-N, plumping for solid male strength and putting a fist in the face of the flabby, whining, slimy world. As for wimmi...

What will America be like in 1970? Miss Caldwell's [apocalyptic "The Devil's Advocate"] makes Spengler seem cheerful by comparison. In this novel of fierce prophecy she sees a Communist conspiracy in control in Washington. The courts and the Constitution have been outlawed; family life is directed by the Government; the fifth world war is about to erupt (this one against South America, the rest of the world being subject and in ruins). Tipping her political hand, she offers as he...

[In Dynasty of Death the] author avoids one ready pitfall of the long family-history novel, that of sacrificing everything to breadth and length. There is a stretch of a hundred years and a cast of actors running into many score. Yet there is intensity of interest, full detail and characterization at each period. The most noticeable weakness of the novel is that the villains are too darkly and consistently villainous and the good people too obviously equipped with a halo. This is seen in the sharp black-and...

Taylor Caldwell's "Dynasty of Death" succeeded in making munitions manufacturers seem considerably more dramatic than they probably are in actuality. "The Eagles Gather," a sequel, is more of the same, only not as good. For one thing, perhaps Taylor Caldwell can keep her Bouchards clear and separate, but there are just too many of them for this simple mind. After a while you lose count, and after you lose count you lose interest. As a matter of fact, I think I lost interes...

When love comes to Caroline Ames Sheldon in Taylor Caldwell's "A Prologue to Love" …, it is page 553, and there are only sixty pages or so to tidy things up: change a few bequests, do a little benevolent blackmailing, engage a brain surgeon, and otherwise try to alter the course of a lifetime of bitchery. Bitchery comes naturally to the wretched billionairess, since the father Miss Caldwell has devised for her is a marvelous nineteenth-century monster of a dad who has everything ...

Return with Taylor Caldwell to ancient Greece [in "Glory and the Lightning"], where characters in desperation are wont to cry: "Wine, in the name of the gods." At an Athenian dinner party, you can hear the architect Phidias say: "Ah, yes, Pericles, I am at your service. I have the sketches drawn, for the Parthenon." Puts you right into the classic picture, where the Acropolis, in its day, was a bigger provocation than the Albany Mall. There are other social parallel...

No question, [Taylor Caldwell] … can tell an engrossing story. She proves it once again in ["Captains and the Kings," a] gigantic novel about the Armagh family, closest, perhaps, in structure to her first big success, "Dynasty of Death." As an Irish immigrant, Joseph Armagh arrives via steerage in the 1850s. Upon the death of both his parents, Joseph, at 13, is left with a baby sister and small brother, whom he leaves with nuns near Pittsburgh. He sets out to support them ...

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 Advocate she presents a simplification of recent past and proximate future both. Her scene is the slave America of the 1970's, the seeds of whose destruction were sown in the 1930's. America's downward slide into a Communist state "had begun with a loathsome use of the word 'security.' And in the name ...

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 picture from that Frank Slaughter has given in The Road to Bithynia…. It is—she tells her readers—a subject on which she has worked most of her life. The result shows an immense amount of research, a dedication to her subject. Luke emerges as a whole man—and most readers will find the biographical aspects of her story—up to t...

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 fiction—never happened. Millions of readers must agree that the narrative innovations of Proust and Joyce, to say nothing of Beckett and Borges, were all a mistake; that old-fashioned linear realism is still the best mode for fiction. So her ["Answer as a Man"] reads the way the works of Arnold Bennett or Theodore Dreiser woul...

Spacious, alive with the bustle of ancient times and places, and illumined by flashes of genuine lyrical intensity, "Dear and Glorious Physician" is the product of an obsession that has challenged Miss Caldwell's talents for more than forty years…. Armed both with insight and erudition, she movingly reconstructs St. Luke's search for God, universalizing his anguish for troubled men everywhere. With her we live his childhood, meet his family and friends, participate in his ...

Big, wordy, sprawling, ["Captains and the Kings"] is probably a thesis novel; there is some loose association with the Kennedy family, though in this instance all of the tragedy is the result of a curse imposed by a ruthlessly destroyed statesman and the time ranges from around 1860 to the second decade of this century; but the theme of an Irish immigrant, raised up to wealth by his own driving passion and bent on making his son President, is finally made secondary to the theme of an internati...

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: "Continued in the Holy Bible, Gospel of St. Luke, and Acts I and II." There is something awesome in assurance like that, something that defies comment. Lucanus (St. Luke) is a very pedestrian fellow who finally comes to some faint understanding of God. Lucanus strikes this reader, at least, as a rather dimwitted figure, unable to account for...

Miss Taylor Caldwell casts her net wide in search of themes and periods for the sort of elaborate fiction she favours…. Nobody need or should despise the amount of work which has gone into the quarter of a million words or so of ["The Arm and the Darkness"]. Regretfully, however, one cannot but wish it had a little more life, a little real substance or individuality. Here, it must be confessed, is rather too much of the stale perfume of historical romance, too much of the faded tinsel, ...

[A Pillar of Iron] is a long and pretentious novel about Cicero which I found extremely annoying both because of its many inaccuracies (I made note as I read of some forty questionable statements) and because it builds up a picture of Cicero that seemed to me to be very far removed from the Cicero most classicists know. For a novelist to deliberately alter historical fact for artistic purposes, and to tell the reader that he is doing so, as Thornton Wilder did in his Ides of March, is one thing. But to set ...

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 new. In what might almost be called The Gospel According to St. Judas, the protagonist describes how, loving Jesus more than the other disciples and having more faith in him, he "betrays" him only that Jesus may prove his messiahship and liberate both Israel and humankind. Judas tries to show, moreover, that it was really he who was b...

["Dialogues with the Devil"] is an exercise in moral indignation without the mechanics of fiction that customarily camouflage Miss Caldwell's opinions. Thus, in an exchange of letters between Beelzebub and the Archangel Michael, we are made directly aware of a catalogue of modern scourges beloved of the devil: egalitarianism, water pollution, Freud, masculine women, insubordinate children, climate control and deodorants for men. (Miss Caldwell doesn't say how the letters are deli...

"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 beautiful but dreadfully downtrodden housemaid in turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania. Ellen is actually the illegitimate daughter of one of Philadelphia's first families, but this doesn't matter to Jeremy one way or another. He marries Cinder-Ellen when she is 17, and their life together, according to Taylor Caldwell, becomes a microcos...

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 tradition he was a gentile Greek. The shadowy figure evoked by these few phrases bursts forth technicolored and Toddeoscale in Taylor Caldwell's ["Dear and Glorious Physician"]…. Aside from any religious conviction, the scholar will deplore the book's heavy-handed reproduction of the period, while any lover of Engl...

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 Bright Flows the River into an extraordinary and memorable novel…. The only reservation that I have is that some of the characters border on clichés, but this somehow did not detract from my enjoyment. In a novel in which most of the action takes place in the minds on the characters, Caldwell manages to sustain the suspense of an advent...

[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-Christian Christian; she glosses over his faults, extols his virtues. Had she shortened some of the scenes and in general been less wordy, she might have had room for a more comprehensive treatment of Cicero's entire life. But even so, she has made his stirring times real. William B. Hill, in his review of "A Pillar of Ir...

Ceremony of the Innocent is well written, but the plot remains unconvincing. This time the notion of a small group secretly controlling the world is implausible. The book may be of some interest because of its autobiographical insights. Miss Caldwell disavows autobiographical intent but also states that [the heroine] Ellen Porter's "thoughts have been my thoughts and her experiences mine also." The author would be well advised to seek another theme the next time. Barbara Si...