Enough Light to See the Darkness

Taylor Caldwell's 40+ novels profoundly influenced conservative readers and politicians of the 1940s through the 1970s. Her daughter Peggy was there for all the events but primarily spoke through her early private position as TC's abused charge. In adulthood, she became TC's companion on many-month voyages to ports of destination, taking over the role of chaperone to her mother's sexual adventures. While Peggy never understood her mother's conservative nature or her effect on TC's reading public, she did recognize and excuse TC's aberrant (and abhorrent) behavior: an insider's view of one of America's most influential conservatives.

Taylor Caldwell was the author of 40+ novels that went through three periods of her development as a famous novelist. Her Dynasty of Death Series offered a view of an America governed by unscrupulous movers and shakers who used their growing fortunes to dominate even the halls of Congress. Her Mediterranean novels gave us the founding of the modern world running through Pericles, Julius Caesar, Cicero, and even Genghis Khan, including the sayings – interpreted by the author – of the famous leaders of their day. Especially her masterpiece, saved for when she was at the pinnacle of her fame: "Dear and Glorious Physician," the presentation of St. Luke as a more relatable Jesus, and an offering of the New Testament in the vision – not stated explicitly – of the heretic Marcion. All done with a background of Jesus Christ coming from an ancient persona she called "The Unknown God." Her last series of novels cast modern America as having betrayed its destiny as a supremely conservative entity destined to worship an autocratic leader. This joint biography gives a coherent story relevant to current political events based on Taylor Caldwell as a recognized forerunner of TBD-Conservatism. TC was born in 1900 and was still publishing feverishly until 1980, though she was incapacitated until her death in 1985. Her mistreated daughter Peggy became a complicated appendage to TC's life for what remained of it, including the complex period from 1980 to 1985, while she attempted to wrest control of TC from TC's last husband, Robert Prestie. Only near the end of TC's sentient period did she recognize that Peggy was the only dependable person in her life.

Michael David Fried has held visiting and multi-year professor positions as a research mathematician at The Institute for Advanced Study, State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Michigan, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tel-Aviv University, Hebrew University, Erlangen University, Essen University, University of California at Irvine (at the latter he is presently an Emeritus Full Professor of Mathematics). He held the following well-known fellowships: Sloan Mathematics Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Lady David Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship. Taylor Caldwell (TC) is his grandmother, Will Combs is his grandfather, and Peggy Fried is his mother. At the core of this biography was a manuscript of 900+ undivided, un-chaptered (and untitled) pages found in the home of Peggy Fried after her death in December of 2007. Fried has revised them and added considerable additional material. Part I is the story of TC during the time of Peggy's birth, her account of TC's idea of parenting through TC's first publication in 1938, and the subsequent period of Peggy's parenting until Peggy's children were gone. Peggy could then concentrate her uninterrupted attention on TC, whose off-and-on-again need for her took up the rest of her life. This Part I continues in Parts II and III, which present a strange symbiosis of parental abuse transferred through three generations, starting with a poor Scotch family: a dynamic story of the author who did much to define modern, anti-democratic conservatism.