Erskine Caldwell

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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).

(1903-1987)

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.

• Born: Dec 17, 1903 in White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia
• Died: Apr 10, 1987 in Paradise Valley, California
• Occupation: Writer
• Active: '40s-'60s, '80s, 2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Crime
• Career Highlights: Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, Le Batard
• First Major Screen Credit: Tobacco Road (1941)

Biography

Few writers were more respected and maligned in their own time than Erskine Caldwell. Renowned as the author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, both of which were among the early huge sellers in the new and burgeoning field of paperback books in the 1940s, he was also reviled in many circles for those same books and their risqué content. Born a minister's son in the Deep South, Caldwell was regarded in academic circles as a master chronicler of his home region, and by many in his home region as a traitor for his honest, unromanticized accounts of the poor in that region. The son of the Rev. Ira Sylvester Caldwell and the former Caroline Bell, Erskine Preston Caldwell was born in White Oak, Coweta County, GA, in 1903. His father's preaching and the family's moves to various congregations over the first decade and a half of his life gave him a unique opportunity to observe people of all kinds (though mostly poor and white) and the manner in which they lived -- what he later called the "antics and motivations" -- all of which became the focus of his subsequent writing career.

After attending Erskine College in South Carolina, Caldwell studied at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania in the early '20s, and then he became a reporter for The Atlanta Journal and later a literary critic for that journal, The Houston Post, and The Charlotte Observer. He also wrote poetry, essays, humor, and short stories, and in 1929 published his first novel, The Bastard. A second novel followed a year later, but in his subsequent career Caldwell declined to include these in his official list of works, preferring to consider his 1931 short story collection, American Earth, as his first full-length published work. Even in those early stories, one can find the elements that would be most strongly identified with his best-known works, including the strange mix of realism and absurdity; the power relationships between men and women, the rich and the poor, and whites and blacks; and an appreciation for low comedy and savage violence.

In 1932, Caldwell's career caught fire with the publication of Tobacco Road. The publication a year later of the novel God's Little Acre only fanned the flames of his success and a good deal of notoriety as well, especially in his home region. The American South had been relatively cash-poor at least since the 18th century, but since Reconstruction, poverty had become a way of life for most of the population. Caldwell's two novels laid bare the shape, the depth, and even the smell of that poverty in a way that no prior literary work ever had; sections of both books were shocking, other parts were funny, and others were sad, while still others were downright titillating in their depiction of raw lust and sexuality. God's Little Acre, in particular, was the subject of a highly publicized obscenity trial that only spread its notoriety and appeal further, while Tobacco Road, adapted to the stage by James Kirkland, became one of the most successful non-musical shows in the history of American theater, running an extraordinary seven and a half years in its original Broadway production. It was also filmed by John Ford in 1941, and the movie did reasonably well. The combination of the movie's release and the book's reputation, coupled with advent of the era of cheap mass-market paperback volumes, led to its becoming a multi-million-copy bestseller.

Not all of the reaction to the two books was positive, however. Ever since the Civil War, Southern romanticists had tried to present a proud and relatively genteel side to the American South, a process which culminated with the 1936 publication of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, however, ran counter to that process, stripping away any romance about the South or Southerners -- his characters in Tobacco Road knew and cared nothing of lost plantations or an idyllic past to cling to; the men were too busy trying to find gold or a woman they could have, and trying to shove each other out of the way to achieve those goals; and the women were no better. Caldwell's years of observing his father's parishioners and the poor among whom he lived had provided him with a shockingly honest vision of his native region -- too honest for many of his southern compatriots, who would have preferred that he look elsewhere for stories to tell. As a result, he was possibly the most respected and resented Southern author of the early '30s. The immense paperback success of those two novels didn't take place until a decade after their publication, and the play Tobacco Road was a couple of years down the line as well. Meanwhile, Caldwell had to earn a living and decided to take advantage of the initial positive critical reception for the books by heading to Hollywood. He made the first of several attempts to succeed as a screenwriter during the 1930s, but did little more than earn a decent living and mark time. He had just one official screen credit from those forays to California, for the 1950 movie Volcano, during his prime years.

Much more substantial was his move into nonfiction authorship in the mid-'50s with the works Some American People and You Have Seen Their Faces, the latter in association with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who became Caldwell's second wife in 1939. His documentary writing was especially highly regarded at the time for incorporating the bracing excitement and richness of his fiction with the clear eye of a journalistic observer. During this period, he also expressed his displeasure with 20th Century Fox for its adaptation of Tobacco Road -- though successful, and representing the work of John Ford in his prime, the producers had insisted on adding a happy ending to the story, which Caldwell couldn't abide. By the mid-'40s, however, the paperback editions of Tobacco Road and God's Litttle Acre were out and spreading a particular outlook on Caldwell's work to millions of readers. His subsequent books, including Georgia Boy (1943), A House in the Uplands (1946), This Very Earth (1948), and Place Called Estherville (1949), plus any earlier titles that were reprinted, played off of the raunchy image of the two most famous novels, with lurid covers and suggestive text that often bore a resemblance to God's Little Acre. That book was finally brought to the screen in 1958 by writer/producer Philip Yordan and director Anthony Mann, in a brilliant movie adaptation.

None of Caldwell's books after the 1940s attracted anything like the enthusiastic readership of his early work, possibly as a result of his losing contact with his native Southern roots. In 1961, 20 years after Ford filmed Tobacco Road, Caldwell's novel Claudelle Inglish was brought to the screen, but by that time, Caldwell's moment had passed as a major popular cultural influence. In 1983, a film was made in Europe based on his first novel, entitled Le Batard. Caldwell passed away in 1987 at the age of 83 -- in 2002 his book The Sure Hand of God became a movie. John Ford's version of Tobacco Road hasn't been seen since the 1960s, but the film of God's Little Acre has been re-released in uncut form by Image Entertainment, and the book versions of each remain in print some seven decades after their original publication. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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