Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include Dynasty of Death, Dear and Glorious Physician (about Saint Luke), Ceremony of the Innocent, Pillar of Iron (about Cicero), The Earth is the Lord's (about Genghis Khan) and Captains and the Kings.

Janet Miriam Caldwell was born in Manchester, England, into a family of Scottish background.

In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo.

Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, who worked for the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.

[6] During her career as a writer, she received several awards: She was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society's monthly journal American Opinion and even associated with the antisemitic Liberty Lobby.

She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives.

Her daughter Mary Margaret Fried accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell,[14] and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.

[6] Taylor Caldwell died of pulmonary failure, secondary to lung cancer, in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985, aged 84.

As a writer Caldwell was praised for her intricately plotted and suspenseful stories, which depicted family tensions and the development of the U.S. from an agrarian society into the leading industrial state of the world.

Caldwell's heroes are self-made men of pronounced ethnic background, such as the German immigrants in The Strong City (1942) and The Balance Wheel (1951).

In her later works, Caldwell explored the American Dream and wrote stories of the "rags to riches" course of life.

Among these was her last great best-seller, Captains and the Kings (1972), which chronicles the rise to wealth of a poor Irish immigrant to America in the 1800s.

In The Earth Is the Lord's (1941), she fictionalized Genghis Khan; in The Arm and the Darkness (1943), Cardinal Richelieu; in A Pillar of Iron (1965), the Roman senator and orator Cicero; and in Glory and the Lightning (1974), Aspasia, mistress of the Athenian leader Pericles.

Mixed into this dialogue are old tales, stories of a lost continent and of other worlds, and theological speculations.

Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific 'truth' of today becomes the discarded error of tomorrow.

Many of Caldwell's books centered on the idea that a small cabal of rich, powerful men secretly control the world.