No, there is no reason to bewail good (“canonical”?) Catholic literature. Both the past and the recent present are rich in it: Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh and Mario Luzi and so many others can satisfy our needs. But what happens with popular literature? Fifteen years ago I organized a conference on this topic at my University: the echoes were limited, the contributions so-so. Personally I did not gain much in knowledge. That is no big deal: just one more of the many things I do not know and perhaps will never know. What is more troublesome is that I do not see around me other people who know much on this subject (or who care about it!). Let me ramble a bit, and perhaps stir some people’s attention.

I read recently two books by an A. M. Quinan. These were adapted from French originals (“freely translated”), full of the 19th century clichés or archetypes (as you prefer), very well documented (with footnotes and occasional explanatory chapters). They were published around 1890 and they deal with Christian martyrdom under Diocletian (“Empire and Papacy”) and Domitian (“Aurelia or the Jews from Capena Gate”). Both are lively, with moments of suspense and action alternating with passages of dignified piety. The first of the two I got because my University library had thrown it out, with typical RC intellectual and financial acumen (a third book by the same author, same cover, same editor can be bought on the web for prices going from $75-$250); the second can be read in . . . a recent Polish translation.

The “adaptor” seems to have been a learned man, since he also published books for the learning of French. These appeared in a rather prominent Baltimore publishing house (Paul Kelly, Piet and Co.) which brought out not only the justly celebrated Catechism, Missals, sundry apologetic volumes, Prayer Exercises, but also volumes of poetry by ladies, today forgotten, such as Amy Gray, Margaret Preston and others, volumes of essays on politeness and education, translation from French, Latin, or Spanish, selling also “Pious Engravings, Rosaries, Medals, Statues, Crucifixes,” textbooks and a variety of “European Editions of Standard and Approved Works.” Catholic publishing-houses (as opposed to neo-Protestant ones) of this kind do not hardly exist any longer.

My slim collection of books of this kind includes a couple of novels by Bruce Marshall (1899–1987), a Scotsman who converted quite young. There are strong Chestertonian echoes in his novels, even in those, many, that deal with war and espionage; in any case, they are not devoid of some charm. At least the author’s whole archive was acquired by Georgetown University, so, for now, it is not in danger of total disappearance.

At the beginning of the 20th century two ladies became star-like best-sellers: Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) and Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885–1970), both of them overwhelming best-sellers in the 1930s to the 1950s. Caldwell was born in Manchester, but moved with her family in early childhood to the United States. Perhaps her most successful books were pieces of social critique, such as Dynasty of Death (1938) and Captains and the Kings (1972), and the total of her published volumes seems to have reached 30,000,000 copies, and some became TV series. She was a force of nature, starting her first novel at the age of 12, allegedly once confronting Mark Twain, marrying four times, collaborating with the much-maligned John Birch Society, writing a tolerably good dystopia, The Devil’s Advocate (1952). One of her others, Pillar of Iron (1965), is not a very successful historical novel, but the lady had the shrewdness to choose Cicero as the role model for statesmen, for which she deserves applause. I have not enough words of praise for Ignatius Press who took the initiative of re-editing Caldwell’s Dear and Glorious Physician (originally written in 1958), a splendid novel on the life of St Luke, and I think that The Great Lion of God (1970), on the career of St Paul, is likewise a respectable achievement. In neither of these books did I find any trace of the anti-Semitism of which she was sometimes accused, but then again I cannot claim to have read everything she published.

Frances Parkinson Keyes was a Virginian by birth and the wife of a governor (later senator), quite cosmopolitan and showered with awards, not least by the Vatican. She wrote all kinds of things: journalism, a cookbook, a highly successful detective story, an account of her Catholic conversion in 1939, but particularly novels describing the past and the present of people in the Louisiana and Mississippi valleys. She too was sometimes accused of racism, but personally (and subjectively) I incline to think that, if present at all, this was due more to her awkwardness of descriptions, than to ill-will. Mrs. Keyes was famous for having acquired General’s Beauregard house in New Orleans, a house in which for a while the early chess genius Paul Murphy had resided.