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| Biography: Erskine Caldwell |
The American writer Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987) was one of the best-selling authors of all time. His novels and stories are distinguished by their brutally realistic depiction of the rural South; his early work was outstanding for a sexual candor uncommon in its time.
Erskine Caldwell was born in backwoods Coweta Country, in the town of White Oak, Georgia, on Dec. 17, 1903. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and the family moved frequently throughout the South. Caldwell's schooling was fragmentary; he attended high school sporadically and took college courses at the University of Pennsylvania, at Erskine College, in South Carolina, and at the University of Virginia.
As a young man, he worked in Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as a mill laborer, farmhand, cotton picker, cook, stagehand in a burlesque house, and book reviewer. In 1925 he left the University of Virginia to become a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, and he married the first of his four wives, Helen Lannigan, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Discovering that newspaper work left him no time for creative writing, Caldwell retreated to Maine for four years. His prolific career as an author was launched by The Bastard, (1929), Poor Fool (1930), and American Earth (1931).
But it was the 1932 publication of Tobacco Road that assured Caldwell's success. The novel depicts the life of Jeeter Lester, a Georgia sharecropper, and his family as they stumble through a series of sexual and financial misadventures, culminating in the destruction by fire of their home and themselves. The novelistic treatment is comic, the structure is episodic, and the rural southern types appear childish, grotesque, and, ultimately, pathetic.
In 1933 Tobacco Road was dramatized and ran for a record-breaking seven years on Broadway, despite an obscenity charge that was brought against it by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The charge was dismissed, as was a similar charge against Caldwell's next novel, God's Little Acre (1933), the story of Ty Ty Walden, a Georgia dirt farmer, and his sons and daughters, and the barren, useless acre of land that he dedicates to God. As in Tobacco Road, Caldwell's theme is the folly and promiscuity of rural southerners. God's Little Acre is one of the all-time best sellers in the history of book publishing.
In the mid-1930s Caldwell spent some years as a Hollywood script writer but continued his amazing book production. After a play, Journeyman (1935), he wrote Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories (1935), The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936), and Southways (1938).
In 1938 and 1939 Caldwell was a newspaper correspondent in Mexico, Spain, and Czechoslovakia, and in 1941 a newspaper and radio correspondent in the Soviet Union. His strong social conscience is evidenced in his nonfiction: Some American People (1935); You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who in 1939 became his second wife, and who also collaborated with him on North of the Danube (1939), Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1941), and Russia at War (1942). His Russian experience is also reflected in Moscow under Fire (1941), All Out on the Road to Smolensk (1942), and All Night Long (1942), a novel of Russian guerrilla warfare.
Two of Caldwell's best-selling novels appeared in the early 1940s, Trouble in July (1940) and Georgia Boy (1943). In 1942 Caldwell married his third wife, June Johnson, with whom he had a son. His postwar works included The Sure Hand of God (1947), Episode in Palmetto (1950), and A Lamp for Nightfall (1952).
In 1957 Caldwell married his fourth wife, Virginia Moffett Fletcher, who illustrated his travel book Around about America (1964). In Search of Bisco (1965) was an account of Caldwell's unsuccessful quest to locate a childhood friend.
After World War II Caldwell lived for many years in Tucson, Arizona.; in the late 1950s he moved to Rheem Valley, California. He finally settled in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1977. While he remained popular abroad, Caldwell and his plain style fell out of fashion in the United States. While he continued to publish new work, he shunned interviews and public appearances. His later books included the comical Miss Mama Aimee (1968), Annette (1973), and Afternoons in Mid-America (1976), a collection of his impressions of ordinary people.
Caldwell's later books failed to generate the excitement of his earlier works, but he had earned his niche as a serious if sensational regionalist. In 1982, the New American Library marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Tobacco Road by releasing it and God's Little Acre in new paperback editions. In 1984, Caldwell was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1985, the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities invited him back to his native state for a series of teas and lectures in his honor. After his visit, Caldwell took note of the many economic and social changes that had taken place in the once destitute rural south.
Shortly before his death, Caldwell completed his autobiography, With All My Might (1987). A heavy smoker for all of his adult life, Caldwell twice underwent surgery for the removal of portions of his lungs. Lung cancer finally overtook him on April 11, 1987 in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Further Reading
The best discussions of Caldwell's work are in Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction: 1920-1940 (1941); Leo Gurko, The Angry Decade (1947); and Wilbur M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in America (1950; rev. ed. 1958). Caldwell himself penned the autobiographical Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write (1951) and With All My Might (1987). Biographies of the writer include J.E. Devlin, Erskine Caldwell (1984), Harvey L. Klevar, Erskine Caldwell: A Biography (1993), and D.B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell (1995).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Erskine Caldwell |
Bibliography
See E. T. Arnold, ed., Conversations with Erskine Caldwell (1988); biography by D. B. Miller (1995); study by J. E. Devlin (1984).
| Works: Works by Erskine Caldwell |
| 1931 | American Earth. Critics view Caldwell's first story collection as case studies of American primitives and its author as "another pupil in the Hemingway branch of the Sherwood Anderson school." Born in Georgia, Caldwell worked as a reporter on the Atlanta Journal, as a Hollywood screenwriter, and from 1938 to 1941 as a foreign correspondent. |
| 1932 | Tobacco Road. Caldwell's first major success, and the first of a series of novels that the author would refer to as "a cyclorama of Southern life," concerns a squalid sharecropper family in Georgia. Caldwell's frank depiction of sexuality and physicality prompts bans and condemnation, particularly from Southerners, but the book becomes a bestseller. Adapted for the stage by Jack Kirkland in 1933, it would set a record, running on Broadway for eight years. |
| 1933 | God's Little Acre. The writer continues his controversial documentation of Southern lowlife in the story of Georgian Ty Ty Waldon's search for gold on his run-down farm. Considered by some to be Caldwell's masterpiece, the book is banned throughout the United States and excoriated in the South for its unflattering portrait of Southern degeneration. After publishing an initial, unsuccessful story collection, American Earth (1931), Caldwell also issues what is regarded as some of his strongest fiction in this second collection, We Are the Living. |
| 1935 | Some American People. In addition to publishing a novel and a short story collection in this year, Caldwell issues this series of character sketches and vignettes from his travels across America, surveying the desolation caused by the Depression. The work helps solidify Caldwell's reputation as a proletarian writer. |
| 1935 | Journeyman. The author continues what he calls his "cyclorama of Southern life" with an emphasis on Southern grotesque in the story of a Georgia community that comes under the sway of a lecherous, gun-toting, itinerant preacher. He also publishes Kneel to the Rising Sun, and Other Stories, a collection of character sketches and incidents in the lives of rural poor Southerners. |
| 1936 | The Sacrilege of Alan Kent. Caldwell's most experimental fiction is a fictionalized autobiography that critic Malcolm Cowley calls a "prose poem that corresponds on a lower scale to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." |
| 1937 | You Have Seen Their Faces. This first of four volumes of photo-essays looks at Southern sharecroppers. Subsequent volumes are North to the Danube (1939) about Czechoslovakia, Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1941), and Russia at War (1942). Bourke-White was one of the best-known photographers of the era. |
| 1938 | Southways. Caldwell's fourth collection of short stories continues his documentation of life among poor blacks and whites in the South. One reviewer remarks, "The picture of the southland which is presented is about as far removed from the old atmosphere of moonlight and honey-suckle as could well be imagined." |
| 1940 | Jackpot: Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell. This collection of seventy-five stories documents the lives of poor Southern whites and the region's corrosive racial conflict. |
| 1944 | Tragic Ground. This book recounts how a Georgia backwoodsman is stranded in a wartime boomtown when a munitions factory closes. Obscenity charges are brought against a Boston book dealer for selling the novel, but twelve days later, all charges are dismissed when Boston judge Elijah Adlow rules that the book is not obscene. |
| 1946 | A House in the Uplands. Another of the author's tales of Southern collapse, this time describing the demise of a decadent aristocratic family. |
| 1948 | This Very Earth. Caldwell continues to dramatize the violent, seamy side of Southern life in the story of a poor white farmer who sells his homestead and moves his family to town. |
| 1949 | A Place Called Estherville. In this installment of what the author describes as his "cyclorama of Southern life," Caldwell takes up the subject of racial conflict in a small Southern town. |
| Writer: Erskine Caldwell |
| Wikipedia: Erskine Caldwell |
Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903, Coweta County, Georgia – April 11, 1987) was an American author.
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Caldwell was born in a house in the woods outside Moreland, Georgia, the son of a minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. His early childhood was spent moving from state to state across the South, as his father found a position in one church after another.[citation needed]
Later, he attended, but did not graduate from, Erskine College. He was athletic, played football, stood six feet tall, and has been described by one of his publishers to have an unusually kind face and otherwise angelic appearance. His political sympathies lay with blue collar workers, and as he went from job to job in his younger days, drew on his experiences with common workers to write books that extolled the simple life of those less fortunate than he was. Later in life, he gave seminars on low income tenant-sharecroppers in the American South.[citation needed]
His first and second published works were Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930) but the works for which he is most famous are his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933).
When his first book came out, it was banned and copies were seized by authorities. Later, on the publication of God's Little Acre, authorities went even further and, at the instigation of the New York Literary Society (apparently incensed at Caldwell's choice of titles), arrested Caldwell and seized his copies when he went to New York for a book-signing event. A full trial exonerated Caldwell completely, and he counter-sued for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
Through the 1930s, Caldwell and his wife ran a bookstore in Maine. Caldwell was married to photographer Margaret Bourke-White from 1939 to 1942, and they collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
At the height of World War II, Caldwell obtained papers from the USSR that allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent documenting the war effort there. Disillusionment with the stifling intrigues of the Stalinist regime led him to pen a four page short story, "Message for Genevieve," published on returning to the United States in 1944. In this story, a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on charges of espionage.
After he came back from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in San Francisco. His ex-wife kept the bookstore in Maine as a property settlement.
During the last twenty years of his life, he got into the habit of traveling around the world for six months out of each year, and he took with him numerous notebooks to jot down his ideas on. Many of these notebooks were not published, but became part of his legacy upon his death, and can be examined in a museum dedicated to him. The house he was born in was moved from its initial site and preserved, and was made into a museum closer to town.
Caldwell died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987. He is interred in Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon. [2]
Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, 12 nonfiction collections, as well as 2 books for young readers. [1]
C.J Stevens has written a biography entitled "Storyteller: A life of Erskine Caldwell." ISBN#1-882425-11-1 [2]
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