Taylor Caldwell
Taylor Caldwell, born Janet Miriam Holland Caldwell on September 7, 1900, in Manchester, England, was a prolific American novelist known for her compelling exploration of societal values and conflicts in her works. After moving to the United States in 1907, she began writing at a young age as a means of escape, eventually penning her first published novel, *The Romance of Atlantis*, at the age of seventy-five. Caldwell's life experiences, including her time as a court reporter and her strong political views shaped by personal hardships, deeply influenced her writing.
She gained significant recognition with her trilogy that began with *Dynasty of Death*, which examined the lives of two Pennsylvania families in the armaments industry. Caldwell's novels often dealt with themes of power, morality, and the tensions between societal progress and personal values. Her works ranged from historical narratives, such as *A Pillar of Iron*, to religious fantasies like *Your Sins and Mine*. Despite facing personal challenges, including the loss of her ability to write after a stroke in 1980, Caldwell left a lasting legacy in American literature before her death on August 30, 1985.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Taylor Caldwell
- Born: September 7, 1900
- Birthplace: Manchester, Lancashire, England
- Died: August 30, 1985
- Place of death: Greenwich, Connecticut
Biography
Janet Miriam Holland Caldwell was born in Manchester, England, on September 7, 1900, the daughter of Arthur Caldwell and Anna Markham Caldwell. Her father, a stern Scot, moved the family to the United States in 1907. According to her autobiography Growing up Tough, Caldwell began using writing as an escape mechanism; she wrote a novel when she was twelve years old that was published when she was seventy-five as The Romance of Atlantis
Caldwell went into the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1918. The following year, she married William F. Combs but found him shiftless by the strict standards to which she had been raised; the couple had one daughter. From 1923 through 1924, she was a court reporter in the Workmen’s Compensation Division of the Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York, and then served as secretary to a board of special inquiry for the U. S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization. These experiences helped to crystallize her political view, and she became a strident anticommunist. Caldwell graduated from the University of Buffalo in 1931, the same year she divorced Combs and married Marcus Reback. She gave birth to a second daughter and started writing in earnest while raising her two children. Her earliest publications were in confession magazines.
Reback served as Caldwell’s literary agent and helped with her research during the years of her early success. Dynasty of Death, the first volume of a three-volume saga tracking two nineteenth century Pennsylvania families of armaments manufacturers, was submitted to the famous editor Maxwell Perkins, who suggested she use an ambiguous byline; she became Taylor Caldwell, and the book became a best-seller. The trilogy was completed with The Eagles Gather and The Final Hour. Caldwell went on to write many other conflict- ridden novels detailing the accelerated transition of the United States from an agrarian to an industrialized society, ceaselessly preaching the incompatibility of the lust for power and money with more precious social and family values. These themes are explored in her novels The Strong City, The Wide House, This Side of Innocence, and The Balance Wheel.
Like many axe-grinding novelists Caldwell marginalized her literary aspirations in favor of propagandizing in such novels as The Devil’s Advocate, which denounces the supposed moral treason of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, but she expanded her scope considerably in historical novels and fantasies. Her historical novels include The Earth Is the Lord’s, about Genghis Khan; The Arm and the Darkness, about Cardinal Richelieu; Dear and Glorious Physician, about the evangelist Luke; A Pillar of Iron, featuring the Roman orator Cicero; and I, Judas. Your Sins and Mine is a religious fantasy in which God decides to take a more active role in human affairs, employing drought as an encouragement to humility and prayer. The contenders in Dialogues with the Devil range far beyond matters of contemporary human temptation to take in the Creator’s plans for the cosmos.
After Reback’s death in 1970, Caldwell married William E. Stancell in 1972 but divorced him the following year. She married William R. Prestie in 1978. Her last novel, Answer as a Man, a rags-to-riches story set in the Depression, was published in 1980, but a stroke she suffered in that year left her deaf and mute and she was unable to continue writing. She died on August 30, 1985, in Greenwich, Connecticut.