To Look and Pass: A Novel

Taylor Caldwell

Oct 2018 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

From the bestselling author of Captains and the Kings: The story of a blacksmith’s son, a small town, and a secret dark enough to seal a man’s fate.
 
Raised in a two-room shack behind his father’s smithy shop, Dan Hendricks was marked as an outcast from earliest childhood. The people of South Kenton assumed the poor, gangly boy would become as shiftless and dissolute as his drunkard father.
 
Despite the withering judgment and abuse, Dan manages to remain honest and open-hearted into adulthood. He founders in his attempt to find the tenderness and support a man needs. He cannot be with the woman he truly loves, and the one he marries takes a perverse pleasure in seeing him suffer. At the limits of his endurance, when Dan finally breaks we are left to wonder whether this is a destiny foretold or a senseless tragedy.
 
Full of the force and passion of Taylor Caldwell’s best-known novels, To Look and Pass is a revealing portrait of the dark side of small-town America from an author who “never falters when it comes to storytelling” (Publishers Weekly).

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.