While the publishing world has been agog for months over the nearly unparalleled success of Alex Haley's Roots, another venture, in its own way just as successful, has gone virtually unnoticed by journalists and critics—though not by readers. John Jakes's American Bicentennial Series of historical novels, which traces the lives and fortunes of the fictitious Kent family from colonial times, has been appearing rapidly in installments since 1974. The Warriors is the sixth of them. It is, like those that preceded it, a very long novel … and like them, too, it should sell spectacularly well, leaving Roots' millions behind….

The difference—or at least one difference—between Roots and the American Bicentennial Series is that while Alex Haley's fictionalized fantasia on his family tree was issued in legitimate hardcover format, John Jakes's novels are poor little paperback bastards. And the literary world is content to let such half-orphans run free, ignored.

Fundamentally, I think, people read both for the same reason: they want to know, if only in a general way, where they came from. Yet I'd be willing to bet that there is little overlap in readership. The racial and spiritual descendants of Kunta Kinte themselves probably have little interest in the saga of a family scattered on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line which treats the causes of North and South so evenhandedly that it is objectively Copperhead in its sympathies. There are no real black characters in the Bicentennial novels—just a few shiftless nigras, a loyal mammy or two, and a revenge-hungry buck whom, once dead, is deemed a "worthy adversary."… [The] Bicentennial Series, in the fundamental nature of its concerns and the quality of its writing, is kind of a Roots fo' white folks….

The trick [of writing a novel], of course, is to weave the strands skillfully, picking up this one and bringing it to a suspenseful climax before dropping it at the crucial moment to pick up the next. And this Jakes does like the craftsman he is, keeping a pace that for a book as long as this one is nothing short of remarkable. Perhaps he relies a little too much on violent confrontations to keep the story moving along, but after all (he would argue) the period treated in the novel was a very violent one.

The author's only lapses are attributable to his apparent determination to use bits of research that only tend to slow the story down. We are given a two-page account of a cornea operation as it might have been performed during the Civil War. We are told more than we really need to know about firearms, locomotives, and Indian artifacts and customs. But even so, the fact bits, which are arguably necessary to any historical novel, are handled with more style and grace here than in some of Jakes's other novels….

If John Jakes were to end his Bicentennial series with this volume, it would stand as a limited, though quite considerable, achievement. It may not be literature, and it certainly isn't history, but rather it is a kind of grand exercise in literary-historical kitsch, a work founded on other historical novels rather than on life. But of course Jakes has no intention of ending his series with The Warriors. As a matter of fact, the seventh novel, The Lawless is announced at the end of this volume, and I'm sure the eighth will be at the end of the next. And thus it will go—perhaps on forever—or at least on close to the Tricentennial.