The Silver Chalice
By Thomas B. Costain

840 Pages • $13.95

The Silver Chalice
By Thomas B. Costain

About the Author

Thomas Costain “has taught history to more people outside the classroom than any professional historian has ever taught inside,” wrote a reviewer of The Silver Chalice in 1952. The Canadian-born Costain turned to book writing after a long career as a journalist and a Hollywood story editor. He wrote best-selling novels about the courts of Kublai Khan and medieval France, the French settlements in Canada, and early New Orleans, as well as a popular four-volume history of the Plantagenet kings of England.

He is best known for The Silver Chalice, a vividly rendered historical novel of early Christianity that was the top-selling novel in the United States in 1952.

The plot of The Silver Chalice centers on the Grail—the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. Tired of “all the Arthurian tripe about the Holy Grail,” Costain imagined his own version of the story. Joseph of Arimathea hires Basil of Antioch, a lowborn artisan, to fashion a beautiful silver casing to hold the plain original cup that Jesus used. The casing is to be decorated with the faces of Jesus and the twelve apostles. To fulfill the commission, Basil travels throughout the ancient Mediterranean world to meet these men and those who knew them intimately.

This plot device plays to Costain’s strengths as a writer. Costain said that he always saw himself as “a reporter . . . in the sense that a reporter tries to be accurate and interesting.” He accomplishes both in The Silver Chalice. Many people love the book because it satisfies the curiosity every reader of the New Testament has about the world of early Christianity. What did Peter and Paul look like? What was behind the conflicts in the early church that are hinted at in Scripture? What did it feel like to be a Christian hunted down by murderous civil authorities?

The Silver Chalice contains a poignant spiritual story as well. Basil is not a Christian when he begins his journey to Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, and places in between. He finds that he cannot “see” Jesus in his mind’s eye in the same way that he “sees” the apostles. Neither can he give himself to the Christian faith that attracts him.

It turns out that Basil is blinded by a personal choice he made early on in the story, one that negatively skews his point of view. He eventually sees the destructive consequences of his choice, and the story brings him to a point where he can make another choice—a choice to be generous and free. Then Basil can “see”—spiritually and artistically.

Costain serves up a rich world of faith and conflict in The Silver Chalice.He gives us an entertaining window into the distant past and, like all good writers, gives us ways to look more closely at the present. Why do some people need to injure and dominate? Why do some live their lives to serve others? What is faith? What does it take to heal wounded hearts?

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About the Author

Thomas B. Costain, the author of many popular and well-regarded historical novels, did not begin writing fiction until he was fifty-seven, after spending his professional life up to that point as a reporter and an editor.

Costain was born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1885. As a teenager, he became a reporter for the local newspaper, and then he moved on to similar positions in Ottawa, Toronto, and Guelph. From 1915 to 1920, he was the editor of Maclean’s magazine, the Canadian national weekly. His success there drew the attention of the popular Saturday Evening Post, a magazine based in Philadelphia that was well known not only for its cover art by Norman Rockwell but also for the fiction published between its covers. Costain was an editor at the Post for fourteen years, during which time he worked with many writers of fiction and became a naturalized United States citizen.

From 1934 to 1942, Costain worked as a story editor at Twentieth-Century Fox in Hollywood, started his own magazine (which failed), and began working for Doubleday as an advisory editor. In 1942, his first novel, For My Great Folly,was published. It was set in seventeenth-century Spain and became a best seller.

Costain spent the rest of his life writing meticulously researched historical novels and popular histories. His most popular novel, aside from The Silver Chalice, was The Black Rose(1945). Set in the thirteenth century, it was an enormous best seller, selling two million copies in its first year of publication—one million of those during the first four months.

Costain’s popular histories focused on British and Canadian history. His four-part Pageant of England is a history of the Plantagenet dynasty, and The White and the Gold, is a history of Canada.

Thomas Costain and his wife had two daughters, one of whom, Molly Costain Haycraft, was a noted historical novelist in her own right. Costain died in 1965 in New York City.

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