I finished reading The King’s Cavalier by Samuel Shellabarger, and I must say I enjoyed it immensely. I then proceeded to look up some information about the author on the web and found out that he was a professor at Princeton and then the headmaster of a private girl’s school. He said that the girls’ school provided more scope for the imagination than teaching at Princeton. He wrote four historical novels: Prince of Foxes (the one I read long ago and loved), The King’s Cavalier (set in Rennaissance France), Captains from Castile ( with Cortez in Mexico) and Lord Vanity. His books were very popular when they were first published in the 1940’s, and Captains from Castile was made into a movie. He might have written more if he had not died of a heart attack in March 1954.
While looking for information on Shellabarger, I came across this list of someone named Azurite’s 100 favorite books ever. Maybe I’ll try to make such a list. I’m discovering a lot of authors that I’d like to try in the process of researching the ones I have. A couple that sound interesting are Angela Margaret Thirkell and Dorothy Dunnett.