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(Janet) Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985) - wrote under the preudonyms Marcus Holland and Max Reiner - original name J. Miriam Reback |
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Anglo-American novelist, a prolific author of popular fiction, who used often in her works real historical events or persons. Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include Dynasty of Death (1938), an epic story about intrigues and alliances of two Pennsylvania families involved in the manufacture of armaments. Her last major novel, Answer as a Man (1980), told a story of a man who begins his rise to prestige and power in the midst of the Depression. "You hard man," said Mr. Maggiotti. Taylor Caldwell was born Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell in Manchester, England, into a family of Scottish background. Her father was a commercial artist, who formerly worked for the Manchester (England) Guardian. Caldwell's family descended from the Clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she was brought to the Unites States with her brother. An uncle of hers, Henry Holland Caldwell, was a professor at the University of Florida just prior to his death. Caldwell started to write stories at the age of eight. A creative child, she was first encouraged by his parents, but in her teens they began to believe that she couldn't make a career out of her writing and took paper and pencils away from her. Caldwell never completed high school, but she attended the University of Buffalo. In 1919 Caldwell married William F. Combs. They divorced in 1931 and Caldwell married Marcus Reback, an officer in the department of Justice, Buffalo; he died in 1970. A few years earlier a thug had broken into their home and fatally wounded him. The attacker had also pistol-whipper her; she was left deaf. Between the years 1918 and 1919 she served in the United States Naval Reserve. From 1923 to 1924 she was a Court Reporter in New York State department of Labor in Buffalo, and from 1924 to 1931 a member of the Board of Special Inquiry at the Department of Justice in Buffalo. With her second husband Marcus Reback, who served as the researcher, Caldwell co-wrote several bestsellers, the first of which was Dynasty of Death. The story begins from the year 1837 and focuses on the entangled relationships of two families, who control a huge munitions trust. Joseph Barbour is a servant, who becomes a successful businessman and arms manufacturer. His son Martin is not interested in money, he is an idealist and altruist. Ernest, the elder son, is an egoist and believes that money is the greatest power in the world. Ernest loves Amy Drumhill, the niece of Gregory Sessions, owner of a steel factory. However, she marries Martin, who establishes a hospital, and dies in the civil war. Ernest's hardness ruins Joseph, and he is cursed by his mother. Dynasty of Death attracted wide attention when it was revealed, that behind the male pseudonym was a woman. The story was continued in The Eagles Gather (1949) and The Final Hour (1944). As a writer Caldwell was praised of her intricately plotted and suspenseful stories, which depicted family tensions and the development of the US from agrarian society into leading industrial state of the world. Caldwell's heroes are self-made men of pronounced ethic background, such as the German immigrants in The Strong City (1942) and The Balance Wheel (1951). Her stories dealt with ethnic, religious and personal intolerance (The Wide House, 1945), the failure of parental discipline (Let Love Come Last, 1949). and the conflict between the desire for power and money and the human values of love and sense of family, presented in such works as Melissa (1948), A Prologue to Love (1962) and Bright Flows the River (1978). In her later works Caldwell explored the American Dream and wrote stories "from rag to riches" course of life, among them Answer as a Man
(1981). However, the economic success of American capitalism seemed to
her a Pyrrhic victory: "The whole country," Caldwell complained to a
friend, "has become soft, whiney, whimpering, demanding, cowering,
lip-licking, feeble – and stupid." (Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties by W. J. Rorabaugh, 2002, p. 5) Caldwell's historical novels include The Arm and Darkness, a fictionalized account of Cardinal Richelieu, Pillar of Iron (1965), fictional biography of Cicero, the Roman senator and and orator, The Earth is the Lord's (1941), a fictional biography of Ghengis Khan. "Beginning with Genghis Khan's birth and ending with his first great victory, the novel is lushly dramatic, more operartic than historically accurate but captures its setting and customs effectively with a wealth of details." (The Biography Book: A Reader's Guide to Nonfiction, Fictional, and Film Biographies of More than 500 of the Most Fascinating Individuas by Daniel S. Burt, p. 159) Though Hollywood bought the rights to many of her novels, they were not made into feature films. The Conqueror (1956), in which John Wayne played Ghengis Khan, was based on Oscar Millard's screenplay, not on Caldwell's novel. Religious themes were prominent in several works. Answer as a Man begins with the clamour of the bells of a little church and end with renewed faith. "Jason
raised his eyes and smiled. God is good. He moves mysteriously, as the
priests say, but he has his ways, he has his ways! He is not the
adversory of man. Man is, Jason thought. God is not to be understood by
man. He is just to be trusted." (from Answer as a Man). In
the story Jason Garrity pins his hopes on the building of a luxury
hotel, but Caldwell deals also with politics and history ("Hell! though
Jason. What can I, as a single individual, do to prevent calamity?
Nothing. Taft is the safest man. He is not an imperialist, like
Roosevelt. Nor a social fanatic like Wilson. I'll vote for Taft."). Dear and Glorious Physician (1959) was about St. Luke's search for God. "A portrait so moving and so eloquent I doubt it is paralleled elsewhere in literature," said a reviewer in The Boston Herald. Dialogues with the Devil (1967), possibly inspired by C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters (1942), was a study of good and evil. This work, a fictional correspondence between Lucifer and Michael, mixed in the dialogue old tales, a lost continent, and theological speculations. --'"Childish raptures! said Lucifer, with scorn, his eyes flashing like lightning. "Are we indeed whimpering and craven children, or slaves? Can we be content with toys and little deliciousnesses? Are we not mind, as well as emotion? And is not the mind, of both angel and man, the noblest of possessions, and worth exercising. It is in our minds that we approach the closest of Him, Who is all Mind. Mind is the creator of all philosophy, all order, all beauty, all satisfaction, but emotion is the lowliest of the virtues, if it is a virtue at all. Mind has in it the capacity to know all things, or, at least, the minds of angels."' (from Dialogoues with the Devil) Caldwell was an outspoken conservative and for a time associated with the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. "The American people, no matter their political party, are basically conservative and love their country," she said in herbook of memoir, On Growing up Tough (1971). "The Liberal knows this better than anyone else. So he fills his press and al the other means of communication with Liberal lies and treacheries so that the average conservative American begins uneasily to wonder if there is something wrong with him . . . " (Ibid., p. 27) Her 's books sold over thirty million copies. Mostly she wrote at night, sometimes from 12 to 24 hours at a stretch. Before giving up cigarettes for good, she smoked three to four packs daily. Caldwell received several awards, among them the National League of American Pen Woman gold medal (1948), Buffalo Evening News Award (1949), and Grand Prix Chatvain (1950). Alarmed by "communist-controlled penetration and subversion" of American government and institutions, she joined in 1961 a group of conservatives, including George Patton III, which used a computer to gather and analyze information on "those who would seek to bring revolutionary change to America." Though Caldwell was first and foremost a writer, not a threat to the national security, the FBI maintained a file on her. She believed that nuclear war was "the tiger looking into every window." (Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties by W. J. Rorabaugh, 2002, p. 39) During the 1960s and 1970s,
Caldwell contributed to the John Birch Society's
magazine, American Opinion, which attracted aging
conservatives and former McCarthyites and occasionally stirred up
conspiracy theories. Caldwell argued that the income tax is
unconstitutional and was created by international bankers to destroy
the dissidents, and that President Kennedy knew too much when he
spoke of "the Gnomes of Zurich" (Swiss bankers and financiers). Beginning from
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the years from 1966 to 1975 in the Unites States saw the
publiction of many novels which more or less directly touched on the subject of conspiracy. It has been suggested that Joseph
Armagh, the protagonist of Caldwell's Captains and Kings: The Story of an American Dynasty
(1972), was modelled after Joseph Kennedy. A good from rags to riches
story, it chronicles the life of a penniless Irish immigrant, who comes
to America in
the mid-1800's, and becomes a wealthy and powerful business leader. To
revenge all those who wronged him, he schemes to get his son elected
the first US Catholic president. In
the 1976 NBC miniseries of the novel Abraham Lincoln (played by Ford Rainey) laments before his
assassination that the warring North and South should not fear each
other but "the financial institution at their backs." (Abraham Lincoln on Screen: Fictional and Documentary Portrayals on Film and Television by Mark S. Reinhart, second edition, 2009, p. 63) The Devil's Advocate (1952), Caldwell's first science fiction novel. was set in the America of the 1970s, where liberal democracy has turned into a Communist style police state. Actually the work, which had much in common with Ayn Rand's thought, was an apology for McCarthyism. Caldwell equated reds and liberals. "I'm perfectly willing to forgive the bastads," she declared in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., an very influential member of the Birch Society, "after I've planted a good firecracker in their careers or rectums." (Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties by W. J. Rorabaugh, 2002, p. 43) The Listener (1960) and its sequel No One Hears but Him (1966) were Christian fantasies about a sanctuary, where people tell about their problems to the Man Who Listens. In 1972 Caldwell married William E. Stancell, a retired real estate
developer, with whom she settled in Ponte Vedra, Florida. They divorced
next year, but Caldwell remained in the seaside community until 1974.
Her fourth husband was William Robert Prestie, a Canadian and a former
Trappist monk; they married in 1978. “Nobody ever helped me. Nobody ever gave me anything. Nobody ever left me anything. Everything I have, I earned myself," Cadlwell said in an interview in 1976. (Taylor Caldwell, Controversial but Popular Novelist, Dies by Ted Thackrey Jr., Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1985) Despite a stroke left her deaf and unable to speak, Caldwell continued writing. At the age of 80, she finished her 35th novel, and signed a two-book contract for $3,9 million. Taylor Caldwell died of pulmonary failure caused by advanced lung cancer in Greenwich, Connecticut, on August 30, 1985.
Selected works:
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