Erskine Caldwell - (1903-1987)
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By Travis WristonI. Biography Erskine Caldwell born in White Oak, Georgia, and educated at the universities
of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Erskine started his writing career by writing for the local newspaper in White Oak, and serving as a baseball correspondent. Having being born in the south Caldwell made racism, poverty,
class, and gender the subject of many of his writings. As late as 1960, Caldwell was under consideration for the Nobel Prize. As one of the first
authors to be published, in mass-market paperback editions, he is a key figure in the history of American publishing. By the late 1940's, Caldwell had sold more books than any
writer in nation's history. After 84 years of touching America in his writings, he died in Paradise Valley, Arizona on April 11, 1987. II. Literary Works
Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write (1951)
In the Shadow of the Steeple (1967) published as Deep South (1968)
General Nonfiction Essays In 1936, reviewers and critics accused Caldwell of creating grotesques, of promoting sensationalism and exaggeration in his fiction. Setting out to prove them wrong, Caldwell
teamed up with Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White to create a photographic account of poverty in the Deep South. You Have Seen Their Faces became the first in a collaboration that went on to produce four volumes. You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) Where to Start?
Novels Tobacco Road (1932) God's Little Acre (1933) Journeyman (1935) Trouble in July (1940) The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936)
Georgia Boy (1943) Caldwell wrote 150 short stories. 93 of these stories are contained in The Stories of Erskine Caldwell
(University of Georgia Press 1996). Where to begin? The reader might take James Korges' advice as quoted above, and begin with the following 25 stories which appear most often in Caldwell scholars' lists of "his best." After-Image (1932) Pagany
Hamrick's Polar Bear (1937) Redbook Stage Tobacco Road Screen Claudelle Inglish (1961) God's Little Acre (1958) Tobacco Road (1941) Videos Audio Cassettes This essay was submitted by a student of Debbie Wooten, a teacher at Bacon County High School in Alma, Georgia.
The author recalls the first thirty years as a writer.
In Search of Bisco (1965) A retrospective.
"Among white southern writers of Caldwell's generation, none fought the evil of racism for as long and in so forthright a manner as Caldwell." - - Wayne Mixon, The People's Writer (1995)
Caldwell explores religions of the south with observations and anecdotes on growing up as a minister's son.
With All My Might: An Autobiography (1987)
Tenant Farmers (1935)
Some American People (1935)
Moscow Under Fire (1942)
Dispatches as a war correspondent for CBS radio.
All-Out on the Road to Smolensk (1942)
Dispatches as a war correspondent for CBS radio.
Around About America (1964)
Illustrated by Virginia Caldwell
Writing in America (1967)
Afternoons in Mid America (1976)
Illustrated by Virginia Caldwell
Text - Picture Books with Margaret Bourke-White
A portrait of the desperately poor in the rural Deep South.
North of the Danube (1939)
Say! Is This the USA (1941)
Russia at War (1942)
Since Caldwell wrote 25 novels, the reader might wonder where to begin. It is generally agreed that Caldwell's most productive period in fiction writing took place in the dozen
years spanning roughly 1932-1944. If one were to start with his most celebrated novels, therefore, they would include the following:
Tenacity in the spirits of men and women deserted by God and man. In 1998, The Modern Library named it one of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century. Jeeter Lester says of God
that "Him and me have always been fair and square with each other . . . I don't know nothing else to do, except wait for Him to take notice".
Censored by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, attacked by the New York Society for the Suppression of vice, this is one of the best-selling novels of all time.
"A beautifully integrated story of the barren southern farm and the shut southern mill, and one of the finest studies of the southern poor white which has ever come into our literature." - - Saturday Review of Literature
"There was a mean truth played on us somewhere. God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people." - - Ty Ty Walden
Part allegory, part tall tale this story derives from a tradition of folklore. "Now it seems one of his finest fictional works, a surprisingly complex and sophisticated study of
fundamentalist evangelical religions in the depression-era South." - - Edwin T. Arnold, Foreword to 1995 edition
This story of a lynch mob contains "some of the most laughable, human, and terrifying pages Caldwell has ever written." - - Richard Wright in New Republic March 11, 1940
Neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, The Sacrilege is often called a "prose-poem". "Once the sun was so hot a bird came down and walked beside me in my shadow."
A collection of 14 interrelated stories narrated by a twelve-year-old-boy. Sometimes listed as a novel, it is at other times classified as a collection of stories. "One of the finest novels
of boyhood in American literature." - - James Korges, Erskine Caldwell (1969)
An Autumn Courtship (1931) This Quarter
Candy-Man Beechum (1935) Esquire
In 'Candy-Man Beechum', my experiment was to see if I could convey the sense of dialect,
the feeling of dialect, by the rhythm of a sentence instead of by the sound of speech." - - Erskine Caldwell in Georgia Review, Spring 1982
Country Full of Swedes (1933) Yale Review
Winner of the Yale Review's 1933 award for fiction
O.Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1933
Daughter (1933) Anvil
The Day the Presidential Candidate Came to Aridad Tamaulipas (1940) Town & Country
Dorothy (1931) Scribner's
The Best Short Stories of 1931
An Evening in Nuevo Leon (1940) Harper's
The Growing Season (1935) Literary America
Interviewers Elizabeth Pell Broadwell and Ronald Wesley Hoag: "Well, in your short story 'The Growing Season', if Fiddler isn't a symbol, who or what is he? Will you tell us?"
Caldwell: "Nope."
Horse Thief (1933) Vanity Fair
The Best Short Stories of 1934
The Jack Kirkland dramatization opened on December 4, 1933. Still one of the
longest-running plays in Broadway history, it ran for 3,182 consecutive performances over a period of seven-and-a-half years.
Director: Gordon Douglas
Cast: Diane McBain, Arthur Kennedy, Will Hutchins, Constance Ford, Claude Akins, Chad Everett, Robert Logan
"My agent told me that the movie of my novel Claudelle Inglish was so poor that I
shouldn't even bother to see it. So I didn't." - - interview with Elizabeth Pell Broadwell and Ronald Wesley Hoag in Conversations with Erskine Caldwell (1988)
Director: Anthony Mann
Screenplay: Philip Yordan
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Cast: Robert Ryan, Tina Louise, Aldo Ray, Buddy Hackett, Jack Lord, Fay Spain, Michael Landon.
Director: John Ford
Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson
Cast: Charley Grapewin, Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy,
Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews, Slim Summerville, Ward Bond, Grant Mitchell.
God's Little Acre
Audio Books
God's Little Acre
1997 recording narrated by Burt Reynolds
Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell Reading Handsome Brown and the Aggravating Goats (1987)
Erskine Caldwell, Interview(1987)
An Informal Hour With Erskine Caldwell (1960)