I try to avoid reading other book reviews before I write one, but in this case it was useful for understanding what was going on. In 1941 MGM proposed a movie, to be called American Cavalcade and following a couple through American history. Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were cast. The project was abandoned as a film but MGM offered the idea to Carl Sandburg.

Sandburg produced this, his only novel. The episodes covered are Plymouth Colony; the Revolutionary War; the westward expansion from ca. 1830 to 1865, with the Civil War; and the Second World War. In each case there’s a young couple – Mary Windling and Resolved Wayfare; Mim Wilming and Robert Winshore; Mibs Wimbler and Rodney Wayman; and Mimah and Raymond Wayman (despite the similarity of names only Rodney and Raymond are related, as grandfather and grandson). The physical descriptions of these characters make it obvious they were modeled on Hepburn and Tracy. A third focus character is a slightly older man who acts as sort of an advisor/counselor/whatever to the young couple: respectively Oliver Windrow, Orton Wingate, Ordway Winshore (Robert Winshore’s father), Omri Winwold, and Orville Windom.

My paperback edition is 989 pages long, in a small font. I expect editors were too intimidated to tell Carl Sandburg he had to cut it down. The cover blurbs used by the publishers are interesting; the reader is promised “…hot blood of conflict and the heady impulses of uninhibited sex…”. Well, there is a lot of conflict and Sandburg is pretty bloody in describing it, but as far as “uninhibited sex” goes, nothing would count as risqué even when Sandburg was writing (1949) – the couples exchange some “warm kisses” but that’s about it. Sandburg spends a lot of words describing clothing – I thought mostly women’s clothing but that’s perhaps because in the eras he’s dealing with there’s was a lot of women’s clothing to describe – and food. The characters make a lot of formal speeches; there’s no sense of the tempi and rhythm of natural speech.

The Plymouth Colony and Revolutionary War sections invoke many historical characters – of necessity, since we know the names of everybody who came across on the Mayflower and all the major figures in Revolutionary Boston. Sandburg obviously did a lot of historical research – for example he mentions a relatively minor historical person from the Plymouth Rock era, Captain John Underhill, that I had happened to come across elsewhere. By the Civil War and World War Two sections the background characters are more fictional.

One thing that impressed me is Sandburg’s treatment of religion. His Plymouth Colony people are devoutly and seriously religious, in the Puritan mode – resolutely convinced that Satan is just out of sight tempting them to fall asleep during a sermon or hold the gaze of a handsome man a little too long. The Civil War era people are also religious but more sanctimonious and judgmental, concerned that their neighbors might be playing cards on Sunday or going to a barn dance on Saturday night. This does seem to capture the “look and feel” of the way people felt about religion at the time.

Not world class literature – despite the author – but certainly worth reading, if you have the time. I suppose that’s a little surprising; that it managed to hold my interest through nearly 1000 pages, in the sense that I wanted to see what happened next. ( )

A sweeping epic, as they say, of American endeavor. The framing story concerns a young couple coming to grips with the psychological aftermath of World War II. The husband's grandfather leaves them his magnus opus - a series of stories following other young couples in other wars of America's past. His overriding theme: civilizations decline when "they forgot where they came from." ( )

This is a book of breathtaking proportions, both in scope, breadth and page count (1067). It is essentially three historical novels, slightly linked, and connected to the present (World War II) by a prologue and epilogue. The three novels are set at pivotal periods of our country's history: The coming of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the period of the American Revolution, and the Civil War. All three novels center around the common people and the events leading up to the watershed times. Sandburg, and the people he writes about, are passionate about the young country and the ideals that led its inhabitants to brave hardship, privation, strife and death to obtain the blessings of liberty. All three novels are powerful and moving, particularly the middle tale about the Revolution. They are presented in the form of a novel written by a just-deceased Supreme Court Judge, and linked to the swirling events of World War II in this way. Sandburg has no peer for bringing the events, people and passions of the past alive. This must have been a very powerful book to have read in the years just following World War II, when a young giant of a country was still grieving over its dead and feeling as though they were unique in their sacrifices. One gets a clearer picture of the youth of this country when realizing that Sandburg must have known and talked with veterans of the Civil War, who probably themselves had grandparents who fought in the American Revolution. Incidentally, there is a particularly moving poem about dead soldiers on page 1003, which I am not clear if it is Sandburg's writing, or a truly anonymous writer. Either way, it is quietly moving, especially in the context of this immense book. ( )