[Nixon's] inventive mind spins out a constant skein of exciting and relevant plots that have made All My Children the leading show in the daytime lineup. (p. 129)

And where do those ideas and themes come from? From life, from the world around us, as perceived by a writer highly attuned to the problems and passions that move us all. This, without doubt, is Agnes Nixon's most valuable asset and greatest talent, this finely tuned sensibility both to the moods of the time and to its stresses. If her invention sometimes seems boundless, it is nevertheless highly disciplined. Truth is the criterion against which she measures her fiction—the changing truths of our time and society, the eternal truths of our hearts.

The basic human motives—love, hate, greed, jealousy—have always been with us and have always been grist for the writer's mill, but each moment of history...