The final step of completing Part II: Seeking a Divine Inspiration, the joint biography of Taylor Caldwell and her daughter Peggy, is the completion of the Part II Afterword:

What was it all worth? Few would balk if I were to say of TC, "She was a complicated character." Ah, but I don't believe it. She had a strong, abrasive personality, a penchant for lying about how she saw other people and little in the way of nurturing or feeling for those around her. She was absolutely full of sociopathic tendencies with their usual ruthlessness. But complicated? I think not.

Without – at least as an adult – a Christian synaptic response in her psyche. Yet, she vehemently wrote as if she was driven by something of substance about Jesus, commencing at the latest, with the publication of Dear and Glorious Physician, the first of her Mediterranean novels. This constitutes a total amount of work that her readers took to heart.

Themes of this Afterword:

TC, a conservative type with a particular method.
Robert Prestie and the end of Peggy's Autobiography.
The Death of Judy and Peggy and Gerry at a Storm's Center.
Scott Prestie and others from out of nowhere.
Peggy's and Marcus Reback's Contributions to TC's Legacy.
Other biographies of TC.
What was TC's Kiersey-Bates Type?
A Deposition Postscript.

Part II of the joint biography of TC and her daughter Peggy ends ot Peggy's Chapter 14, on the page numbered 662. The core of Part II has Peggy's chapters 8 through 14, the years of TC's greatest fame, and the details of Peggy's relation to TC, especially the events aboard those excruciatingly expensive voyages on the High Seas. For Part II, I have renumbered those chapters to suit the separation of Part II from Part I, which has already been published.

While the distance from p. 662 to the last page, number 909, is substantial, much of that material is someone's typing, maybe not even Peggy's, of the depositions taken of Peggy and others around her battles against Robert Prestie for ownership of TC during TC's incapacitance. It includes a long People Magazine article that gives some sense of what "People" – a magazine at the heart of America during those years that pandered greatly, but with an impressive savvy of what Americans were like – thought of the famous author. For certain, that article was typed by my brother Jeffrey, not Peggy. I retained this material as I did with Marcus Reback's will.

Those years ended just before the era of Ronald Reagan and Marget Thatcher, two in Democratic countries who had compatible agreement with TC as to what recommended conservatism, foremost its antagonism to the word "progress." You can't miss that what TC hated the most about that word. How much it implied the world was changing from what she understood and would be without any vestige of what her life was about when she was gone.

In continuing into Part III, I leave out vast portions of these depositions that have no discernible bearing on the story of TC and Peggy, except perhaps that haughtiness of Peggy's personality, against the advice she gets from all sides. Part III, though, covers not only the suicide of (TC's daughter) Judy but also what happened to Peggy and Gerry after Peggy ended her autobiography. Recounted in sections of this Afterword, my siblings and I dealt with the aftermath of the deaths of Peggy and Gerry, interactions with Scott (the son of Robert) Prestie, and the relation of America to the attitudes of TC and organizations who found value in her utterances and attitudes.

This Afterword's penultimate section considers TC's personality based on what we learn from Peggy (and my first-hand knowledge). You will find it surprising. At the bottom of this Afterword, I have comments on a deposition of Robert Prestie that, to date, give my best impression of what happened with TC in her last five years (1980–1985).

Here is the advertisement for Openroad's sale of

Captains and the Kings By Taylor Caldwell (1972)

$2.99 normally $17.99 Expires 09/23/24. New York Times bestseller: After striking it rich in America, an Irish immigrant pays the price for his success and once-in-a-lifetime love in this sweeping saga from a master of historical romance.

I remind that I (her grandson) first heard about its production as one of the very first television movie, upon seeing it playing on TVs in the store window of the major department story in downtown Jerusalem in the spring of 1977, about a week after I met the woman with whom I espied it, who became my second wife. A stunning Finnish woman who knew all about ABBA, spoke little English, and knew nothing at all about the famous TC. Of course, at the time, that last part was close to true of me, too.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble

Go here for Part I: Amazon Sales:
There have been several reorders of the original stock.

The sign-up for the Enough Light Newsletter is here.

Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell