There Was a Time: A Novel

Taylor Caldwell

Sep 2018 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A novel of one man’s ambitious life and tragic love from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Captains and the Kings.

As the twentieth century begins, Frank Clair comes of age near the Canadian border of upstate New York, haunted by early memories of England. Unloved by his parents and bullied by local children, Frank finds happiness only in stolen moments with his friend Jessica. But when fate tears these young friends apart, he fears he will never be truly close to another person again.
 
Striking out for the mountains of Kentucky, Frank attempts to make his fortune in oil. But his artist’s sensibility is ill suited to the cutthroat business world, and a violent showdown sends him back to New York, where he finds work as a magazine writer.
 
Only when he channels his rage and despair into a novel about a family of war profiteers does Frank strike upon a formula for the wealth and success he’s been so desperate to achieve. But when he sets out to find Jessica and win back her heart, Frank discovers that his unlikely rise to the top may have come at a price too high to bear.
 

About the author

Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read authors of the twentieth century. Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, she moved with her family to Buffalo, New York, in 1907. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel when she was twelve. Married at age eighteen, Caldwell worked as a stenographer and court reporter to help support her family and took college courses at night, earning a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931. She adopted the pen name Taylor Caldwell because legendary editor Maxwell Perkins thought her debut novel, Dynasty of Death (1938), would be better received if readers assumed it were written by a man. In a career that spanned five decades, Caldwell published forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers. Her best-known works include the historical sagas The Sound of Thunder (1957), Testimony of Two Men (1968), Captains and the Kings (1972), and Ceremony of the Innocent (1976), and the spiritually themed novels The Listener (1960) and No One Hears But Him (1966). Dear and Glorious Physician (1958), a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God (1970), about the life of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time. Caldwell’s last novel, Answer as a Man (1981), hit the New York Times bestseller list before its official publication date. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1985.