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| God's Little Acre | |
|---|---|
 1st edition |
|
| Author | Erskine Caldwell |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
| Publication date | 1933 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-0820316635 |
| OCLC Number | 30624122 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.52 20 |
| LC Classification | PS3505.A322 G6 1995 |
God's Little Acre is a 1933 novel by Erskine Caldwell, which was made into a film of the same name in 1958.
The novel was so controversial that a literary board in New York attempted to censor it, leading to the author's arrest and trial for obscenity. Exonerated after a jury trial, the author counter-sued the literary society for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
It is laced throughout with racy innuendo, calling into question the issue of marital fidelity.
God's Little Acre was published by Viking Press in 1933. In it, the author Erskine Caldwell sets his sights to the industrialized South. Influenced in part by the textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, he considered this work to be a "proletarian" novel dealing with the plight of workers deprived of union protection. It was intended to support these mill hands, or "lintheads," as they were sometimes called. Will Thompson, who leads the strike, represents both the inherent power and the frustration of the working class. When Thompson is killed by guards as he attempts to reopen the mill shut down by its ruthless owners, his death becomes a rallying cry; and his corpse is borne through the streets, but the mills remain closed.
The book also examines the misuse of the land and other natural resources. Ty Ty Walden, who owns a small farm, spends his time digging for gold instead of farming the rich soil. He suffers from a severe case of gold fever. "If you had the fever," he tells Pluto Swint, "you wouldn't have time for nothing else.... It gets a man just like liquor does or chasing women..." His delusion and the tragedy it brings to his family again illustrate the waste Caldwell saw in southern attitudes toward the land.
The title of the book refers to Ty Ty's land, full of holes. Ty Ty feels he is generous by setting aside one acre to be "for God" - that all proceeds from the acre will be donated to the church. But in actuality, Ty Ty "moves" the acre around to make sure that he never digs on it - he doesn't want to risk his gold going to the church.
Ty Ty spends 15 years digging holes in his fields looking for gold while his hot-headed sons do less digging and more squabbling over women. He has raised 3 boys and 2 girls on his own. All 3 boys and one girl have married, while the youngest girl, Darling Jill, is a sex-pot sleeping with everyone who she can. Griselda, one of the sisters-in-law, has a gorgeous body and everybody wants to sleep with her. Ty Ty makes sure that he tells everyone how sexually attractive he finds her. Ultimately, disaster results.
Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Caldwell changes the tone of the book from "farce" to "tragedy." This puts the narrator on the spot, even one as skilled as Buck Schirner. Inevitably, Schirner's hilarious hillbilly accent, which is appropriately presented at the beginning of the book, becomes a near travesty as the final tragedies unfold.
While the book's sexual exploits are rather tame by today's standards, it is still rather sex-filled. There are scenes of men standing and watching their naked female family members undressing, taking baths, and having sex, etc. There is little sense of any character in the book having dimension. They are either sex-obsessed men, or sex-object women. As the God's Little Acre contained scenes of explicit sexuality, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took Caldwell and Viking Press to court for dissemination of pornography. More than sixty authors, editors, and literary critics rallied in support of the book, and Judge Benjamin Greenspan of the New York Magistrates Court ruled in its favor. The court case is still considered a major decision in the establishment of artists' First Amendment rights in freedom of expression. Having sold more than 10 million copies the book remains today one of the most popular novels ever published.
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