Taylor Caldwell

Author Information
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  • Bibliography:
    40 Books (2 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1938
  • Latest Book:
    September 2018
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About the Author

Taylor Caldwell was born in Manchester, England. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve (although it remained unpublished until 1975). Her father did not approve such activity for women, and sent her to work in a bindery. She continued to write prolifically, however, despite ill health. (In 1947, according to TIME magazine, she discarded and burned the manuscripts of 140 unpublished novels.)

In 1918-1919, she served in the United States Navy Reserve. In 1919 she married William F. Combs. In 1920, they had a daughter, Mary (known as "Peggy"). From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York. In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo. In 1931 she graduated from SUNY Buffalo, and also was divorced from William Combs.

Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, a fellow Justice employee. She had a second child with Reback, a daughter Judith, in 1932. They were married for 40 years, until his death in 1971.

In 1934, she began to work on the novel Dynasty of Death, which she and Reback completed in collaboration. It was published in 1938 and became a best-seller. "Taylor Caldwell" was presumed to be a man, and there was some public stir when the author was revealed to be a woman. Over the next 43 years, she published 42 more novels, many of them best-sellers. For instance, This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Her works sold an estimated 30 million copies.

Her books were big sellers right up to the end of her career. During her career as a writer, she received several awards.

She died of heart failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985.

Full Series List in Order

Barbours/Bouchards

1 - Dynasty of Death (1938)
2 - Eagles Gather (1940)
3 - The Final Hour (1944)

Related

1 - The Listener (Sep-1960)
2 - No One Hears But Him (1966)

Book List in Order: 40 titles

  • Dynasty of Death

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy
    Barbours/Bouchards - 1

    An epic multigenerational saga stretching from 1837 to the eve of World War I, about the Bouchard and Barbour families, who grow their small munitions factory into a great international corporation. Joseph Barbour is a servant, who becomes a succe...

  • Eagles Gather

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy
    Barbours/Bouchards - 2

    This is an unforgettable novel of a titanic family, of the greed that nourished them and of the strange, haunted love that even their immense power could not crush. The saga continues two generations later, still a story of brother against brother...

  • The Earth is the Lord's

    For Taylor Caldwell's legions of fans, this novel provides her usual wealth of historical detail and finely drawn characters. The book covers the early life of the great conqueror, focusing primarily on characters: his stern and indomitable mother, t...

  • Strong City

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Poverty had drained him of all mercy, the great blast furnaces of the steel mills had burned all love and honor from his heart. Nothing was left but a hunger of wealth, a dream of power, and the terrible knowledge that only the ruthless could rise fr...

  • The Arm and the Darkness

    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    THE CARDINAL LUSTED AFTER THE YOUNG QUEEN, AND ALL OF FRANCE KNEW IT! Taylor Caldwell's incomparable talent as a storyteller has never been more brilliantly revealed than in this thrilling novel of France in the time of the infamous Cardinal Riche...

  • Turnbulls

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Taylor Caldwell's unforgettable novel of John Turnbull, who fled Victorian England in heartbreak and disgrace, his life broken by one night of drunken lust, to build an empire of wealth and power in a brash new world... and Eugenia MacNeill, whose na...

  • The Final Hour

    Barbours/Bouchards - 3

    The Bouchards, by a stroke of the pen or a word in the right ear, could change the destiny of nations -- and they did. But all was not well within the family fortress... There was Henri. He was consumed by his lust for power -- and his illicit pas...

  • Wide House

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Portrait of a Magnetic and Wicked Woman in Pre-Civil War American. Janie Cauder , the young wife who hounded her husband to his grave.. the rapacious mistress whose lover fled from her into a sterile marriage..the vehement mother who drove her childr...

  • This Side of Innocence

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Beautiful Amalie Maxwell, low-born, but driven by limitless desires, came to Riversend and instantly touched off a holocaust of passion, hatred and intrigue that blazed through three generations of the lordly Lindseys. None but the supreme storytel...



  • There Was a Time

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    AN UNFORGETTABLE NOVEL Two beautiful women wanted Frank Clair -- the handsome, talented, sensitive artist aflame with an adventurer's passion for life, and with a burning lust for money, fame, and women... One would give him all she had -- ...

  • Melissa

    Melissa The most riveting portrait of a woman's passion since the Brontes' demon-haunted lovers. Melissa -- beautiful, obsessive, pledged to a terrifying devotion... Geoffrey -- her husband, who raged and fought for her love...

  • Never Victorious, Never Defeated

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Taylor Caldwell, whom millions know for her powerful novels about American industrial dynasties, writes here in the vein of her greatest successes. Her theme is one welling from the heart-springs of American life -- the story of the Interstate, a...

  • Your Sins and Mine

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Mankind falls under a sentence of death in this fable of a world without faith from a #1 New York Times"bestselling author. First there were the changes in weather. Lack of rain was turning the plains of Iowa, Kansas, and Idaho into arid blocks ...

  • A Tender Victory

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    INNOCENCE AND EVIL... Lorry Summerfield was a lovely and gifted girl, perfectly made, it seemed, for great and fulfilling love. But Lorry was lost, overwhelmed by life. Then came John Fletcher, who soon found himself deeply involved with Lorry a...

  • The Sound of Thunder

    From the New York Times - "bestselling author of Captains and the Kings: A self-made man sacrifices everything for his family in turn-of-the-century New York. The son of a socialist German shopkeeper, Edward Enger has one dream: to turn his father...

  • Dear and Glorious Physician

    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Set against a rich and sweeping tapestry of ancient days, alive with human passions and spiritual splendor, here is the magnificent story of St. Luke -- the healer, the man of science, who sought, rejected and rebelled against God; who tasted the d...

  • The Listener

    Related - 1

    Who Was The Mysterious Listener? And what strange power did he offer to fifteen people on a desperate quest? John Godfrey, retired lawyer in a large midwestern city, erects a beautiful marble sanctum as a monument to his late wife. Inside, behi...

  • A Prologue to Love

    In A Prologue To Love Taylor Caldwell has written a profoundly moving novel of a woman, rich beyond imagining, whose inability to give or accept love, whose fear of poverty and hostility towards the world brings in its wake tragedy and unhappiness fo...

  • The Late Clara Beame

    • / Romantic Suspense
    • Buy Buy

    A spine-chilling tale of mystery and murder by one of America's most famous novelists IT ALL SEEMED SO PERFECT... Home for Christmas -- snow-laden trees, a blazing fire, carols around the piano...the Frazier family reunion at the old stone ...



  • Grandmother and the Priests

    Grandmother and the Priests is a powerful tribute to the memory of all God's servants, the hard-working clergy who dedicate their lives to helping others. Taylor Caldwell brings to life eleven different parishes, many of of which are extremel...

  • A Pillar of Iron

    The spirit of ancient Rome in its last days of glory. The hero of the story, the man called "a pillar of iron" is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the lawyer-statesman who tried vainly to save the republic he loved from the forces of tyranny. Unfolding...

  • Wicked Angel

    Taylor Caldwell's novel, Wicked Angel, is the story of a young boy named Angelo Saint (the fanciful name is the choice of his mother, who spoils him shamelessly). The story begins when the handsome, charming, and almost unnaturally intelligent "Angel...

  • No One Hears But Him

    Related - 2

    Sequel to Caldwell's The Listener. A novel about John Godfrey's sanctuary, the strange and beautiful sanctuary is a place where the Man who Listens waits to comfort the despairing of the world -- the unloved, the frustrated, the hopeless -- to whom n...

  • Dialogues with the Devil

    Only a writer as eloquent as Taylor Caldwell can bring into such dramatic focus the mystery and terror of life. The revelations unfolded here illuminate the darkest corners of the human soul and strip us naked in the mirror of our own evil. What is t...

  • Maggie -- Her Marriage

    Beautiful, rebellious, and proud, young Maggie Hamilton was determined to rise above the crude, impoverished life her blacksmith father had imposed on the family. The town women laughed at Maggie's ambition -- until John Hobart, the richest, most ...

  • Balance Wheel

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    One Against Armageddon Charles Whitmann was a lonely man, a widower. Though he loved a woman, every code of honor and decency forbade him to speak of this love. Isolated as Charles was, he was the head of a great industry -- and he had Jimmy, the ...

  • Testimony of Two Men

    Someday the town of Hambledon might forget the lies they told about their brilliant young doctor. But they could never forgive the truths he told about them.
    From this compelling story of a doctor at war with the world he has been taught to heal, ...

  • Let Love Come Last

    A SHATTERING NOVEL OF GREED'S DESTRUCTION -- AND LOVE'S TRIUMPH It was a spring like no other. Ursula's father died and left her to face an uncertain future. Then William Prescott took over her life. To his obsession with power and money, he added h...

  • Great Lion of God

    New York Times Bestseller: A “beautifully written” and “truly outstanding” novel based on the life of Paul the Apostle (The Cincinnati Enquirer). Born a veritable great lion of God to a devout Jewish family, Saul of Tarsus is raised by his pa...



  • Devils Advocate

    Andrew Durrant could have had everything the world had to offer -- wealth, fame, honors, authority. All he had to do was sacrifice that fragile thing called integrity. Instead Andrew Durant chose a different path. Against him were ranged the mighty f...

  • Captains and the Kings

    When Joseph Armagh first saw America in the early 1850s, he was a twelve-year-old Irish immigrant -- a penniless orphan cast upon a hostile shore to make a home for himself. Years later, in his palatial estate, he looked back on his long, rich li...

  • To Look and Pass

    If Dan Hendricks had been born thirty or so years later, things would not have happened as they did. In a restless and mobile nation he could have escaped from the past, assumed another identity. But in the close-knit community of South Kenton at the...

  • Glory and the Lightning

    Aspasia was born to danger. Before her birth, her father had announced his intention of abandoning the child to die, should it be a girl. Hidden away and trained as a courtesan, Aspasia was educated in the arts of seduction in the exotic world of Per...

  • The Romance of Atlantis

    The magnificent, sensuous Empress of Atlantis expected the foreign ambassadors. She even knew their mission. If she would wed their Emperor, Atlantis would be protected from invasion. She loathed the man, but had to reckon with his enormous power. ...

  • Time No Longer

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    The Third Reich tightened its grip on the German people -- and Karl Erlich watched with horror and disbelief as his beloved twin brother Kurt grasped Hitler's madness and made it his own. Time No Longer follows the strange fate of the Erlich brot...

  • Ceremony of the Innocent

    Ellen Watson was born into servitude. The humiliating life of hard toil was the only one she ever knew. Until Jeremy Porter. The eminently successful New York lawyer saw a ravishingly beautiful woman in the rough and tattered serving girl. He saw the...

  • I, Judas

    Judas, the myth, history's arch betrayer who sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver and stands for all time as a figure to be rejected and reviled; Judas, the man, son of wealth and power, a young rebel, a disciple who fought to suppress the lusts...

  • Bright Flows the River

    He was a man who had everything -- money, power, status. He had built an empire out of a worthless scrap of farmland, rising from the wrong side of the tracks to move gracefully within the inner circles of the very rich: the American dream came t...

  • Answer As A Man

    This was the world of Jason Garrity. A man of passion and principle. A man who had pulled himself up from the slums and now had everything he thought he wanted. What he wanted was beautiful Patricia Mulligan, daughter of the town's wealthiest m...



  • On Growing Up Tough

    Taylor Caldwell's novels have sold in the millions. She is one of the world's most widely read writers, yet during her long career she has remained a very private person. Now she looks with disarming candor at her own life and at the early years i...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Taylor Caldwell has published 40 books.

Taylor Caldwell does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, On Growing Up Tough, was published in September 2018.

The first book by Taylor Caldwell, Dynasty of Death, was published in January 1938.

Yes. Taylor Caldwell has 2 series.
Pseudonyms / Co-Author
Author Series
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