''None Shall Look Back'' is a 1937 novel by the American author

Caroline Gordon Caroline Ferguson Gordon (October 6, 1895 – April 11, 1981) was an American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and an O. Henry Award in 1934. Biography Gordon was bor ...

. It is set during the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

and follows the career of Rivers Allard, a man from Kentucky who is enlisted in the

Confederate States Army The Confederate States Army (CSA), also called the Confederate army or the Southern army, was the Military forces of the Confederate States, military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) duri ...

Title

The title is from the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

Nahum Nahum ( or ; ''Naḥūm'') was a minor prophet whose prophecy is recorded in the ''Tanakh'', also called the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. His book comes in chronological order between Micah and Habakkuk in the Bible. He wrote about the ...

2.8: "But Nineveh is of old like a pool of water; yet they shall flee away. Stand! Stand! shall they cry, but none shall look back". Gordon's preferred title, which she selected before she began to write the book, was ''The Cup of Fury'', which references

Jeremiah Jeremiah ( – ), also called Jeremias, was one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah authored the Book of Jeremiah, book that bears his name, the Books of Kings, and the Book of Lamentations, with t ...

25.15: "For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me, Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send this, to drink it".

Reception

Edith H. Walton reviewed the book in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' when it came out, saying it was Gordon's most ambitious novel and that it makes it "obvious at once" that the author "has many assets in her favor". Anne M. Boyle calls it "a work of violent confrontation with a culture where traditional race and gender arrangements have been disrupted" and says it demonstrates "the bleakness of the modern patriarchal world and the helplessness of its untutored children".

References

{{reflist 1937 American novels Novels set during the American Civil War Charles Scribner's Sons books