The Announcement of the upcoming publication of Enough Light to See the Darkness Part II: Seeking a Divine Spark (1959–1980).


The publication is expected to occur around the end of April. Preliminary to it, I will use this newsletter to display an abstract for each Section and the titles of the chapters within each section. There is a Foreword Section, Seven Sections based on material from the 900+ pages from my mother, Peggy, and an Afterword section.

*|FNAME|*, I hope you find this interesting, though it is an experiment to see an effective way to advertise the book.

Following an abstract for each section, I will list the Chapters within the given section. For each section, I will include some carefully selected text – that can stand alone and give a sense of what some chapters are about – but that, too, is an experiment to be adjusted as I continue.

I have a tentative title page with appropriate graphics, but I expect the volume editor to produce something more artistic, following my instructions. I'll wait a little before using the title page and other media files I have prepared. I expect to produce one section introduction a week for nine total. Here's the first.

Abs. Foreword: Source of a mid-career Change

Taylor Caldwell was a late-blooming novelist whose four-novel series, Dynasty of Death, established her as a perennial bestseller and an exposer of deep national conspiracies. However, her massive, highly anticipated tomes failed to earn literary accolades. Perhaps inspired by Ayn Rand's success, she made a mid-career shift. Two novels – The Sound of Thunder (1957) and the St. Luke story Dear and Glorious Physician (1959), which she had contemplated since she was 12 – marked a transformation from her miracle-filled, God-referencing atmosphere to a direct, Jesus-centered approach. While the former discussed brilliance, the latter elaborated on the story of a world-renowned genius that sold five million copies, positioning her as an original among ultra-conservatives.

She advertently crafted a key conservative defense: "You are attacking my Christianity" if you pointed out the hypocrisy, lies, and lack of Christian attitudes in conservative behavior. She refined this behavior through her gaslighting interactions with her daughter, Peggy – a severely abused child – leading to Peggy becoming Taylor Caldwell's inseparable buffer to society. Peggy's reward for documenting TC's behavior was lengthy stays on famous ocean vessels that – while they lasted – alleviated Peggy's ongoing depression. We intertwine these co-created lives and their resistance to the evolving world of the '60s and '70s.

Between 1938 and 1958, Taylor Caldwell produced 20 volumes, one a year. The last of these, The Sound of Thunder (1957), finished roughly half her publication life. In this volume, she polished off themes she had mastered regarding battles between siblings and the control of one dominant personality in a family.

The success of the Dynasty series emboldened Caldwell to believe she could address characters significant to world events based on the conservative mantra of personality traits that dominated the lesser members of society. At the outset of these publications, leading up to WWII, this endeavor struck readers as relevant to newspaper headlines.

William Combs, my grandfather, is in the rearview mirror of her life, though she needed to finish that divorce and cement her marriage with Marcus Reback. Her pent-up production to Dynasty ... (once its sales were assured) produced several more volumes that sold well, making her quite a reputation. Twenty years later, with her growing fame and esteem as a salable writer, she could take stock of her life in an interesting new way by aiming for themes that she had always intended but may have differed from the choices of her editors.

The 1957 to 1959 divide in Caldwell's writing (and perhaps her life) is "bookended" by the publications of The Sound of Thunder (1957) and Dear and Glorious Physician (1959). A reader of Caldwell's novels could easily catch her conservatism. One characteristic of it was Caldwell's insistence that the duplicity and hypocrisy of the North caused the Civil War. For example, in Dynasty of Death, northern munitions makers instigated the Civil War to support the fortunes they could make off its epic battles. In The Sound of Thunder, blacks were well aware, according to Caldwell, that they were better off in the 'loving' South than they ever were in the cold, brutal North.

The remainder of the chapters in the Foreword Section:
An extract from Chapter F.2

In The Sound of Thunder, Caldwell's protagonist reflects on the meaning, goal, and driving force of life, yet laments his inability to find solace in such thoughts. In Dear and Glorious ..., Caldwell explores the same theme but with a more prominent protagonist. Both Peggy and Caldwell achieved their respective successes: Peggy became a source of support for Caldwell as she gained fame. However, Caldwell recognized the need for someone closer to God and Jesus to help her articulate her thoughts on finding meaning.

Luke found meaning in trying to understand how Jesus fathomed faith in God's hand in the world, even though He dwelled in a world where powerful pagan forces and Jewish orthodoxy surrounded him. Luke found meaning in it, and Caldwell wrote one of her big novels about Luke's quest. Jesus was a Jew, Luke was not, and Paul (not to get his own Caldwell novel until 1970), a Jew also was the synthesis between them and us.

Like most conservative commentators on the political scene, Caldwell spoke as if the public was a like-minded mass that she needed to remold. Excluding those she anointed, she thought her enemies deluded the masses. In Sound of Thunder, we see precisely the division from which she felt her strong people had to extract most Americans. Strangely, though it was the time of the Vietnam War, the very same time when the John Birch Society was calling Dwight Eisenhauer a communist, this is where she starts the equation Socialism=Communism=War Mongers who dragged us into the two World Wars.

Twenty years ago, Taylor Caldwell's preoccupations would have been considered old-fashioned. Today! I think not.


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Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell