Book details

  • Genre:biography & autobiography
  • Sub-genre:Personal Memoirs
  • Language:English
  • Series Title:Enough Light to see the Darkness
  • Series Number:2
  • Pages:776
  • eBook ISBN:9798317802073
  • Paperback ISBN:9798317802066

Enough Light to see the Darkness:

Part II: Seeking a Divine Spark

By Michael Fried

Overview


In her mid-career, Taylor Caldwell recognized her power as a conservative author with a large audience with special renown among conservatives in the 1950s through the 1970s, featuring her relationship to the John Birch Society and the apartheid government of South Africa. Peggy Fried, TC's daughter, travels the world on ocean liners and to other places as a high-placed tag-a-long with TC. Not her amanuensis, not her valet, not seriously her caretaker, and certainly not a close-at-home editor. As Peggy's oldest child, Michael Fried got responses from Peggy only from the world filtered through her mother. Still, unlike others in TC's orbit, Peggy responded to TC with considerable skepticism.
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Description


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. Affected by Ayn Rand's success, Caldwell 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 writing 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 life of a world-renowned genius. It sold five million copies, positioning her as an original among ultra-conservatives. She inadvertently 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, 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. Intertwined in these co-created lives is their resistance to the evolving world of the '60s and '70s.
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About The Author


Michael David Fried is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California at Irvine. His research, which can be found on his website, has four divisions according to the projects of his published papers. On his website, years of newsletters are included, which he wrote while developing the themes of this project and are based on Taylor Caldwell's novels, her daughter Peggy's collected pages, along with his own research on the family. This biography is part two in a series that covers the years of Taylor Cadwell's fame up to her death. Visit Michael David Fried's website here: https://www.math.uci.edu/~mfried
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