Reading Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell has been compared to literary giants like Faulkner and Hemingway, yet he has also been reviled as peddler of pop trash. Was he a genius, or just a shooting star whose brilliance faded long before he stopped writing? Caldwell began his career in the late 1920s and gained fame for revealing the gritty backwoods South in novels such as his seminal Tobacco Road. He wrote prolifically, sometimes as much as a book a year. As the editor of this book maintains, perhaps anyone who wrote so much would inevitably stumble. These 12 essays explore a variety of issues. They discuss Caldwell as humorist, social commentator, modernist, and revolutionary novelist. They examine his themes and tropes (political images, social injustice, the environment, ideological struggles) and his use of artistic devices (short stories, cubist strategies, repetition). A generous bibliography includes not only books on Caldwell but also chapters and forewords, journal articles, essays, news items and obituaries. The reader is encouraged to look at Caldwell with fresh eyes, to press beyond his controversial image, and to compare his works, especially his early ones, to those of any of the top names in literature.

DIVDIVFourteen stories that follow a young boy coming of age in a dysfunctional family in the rural South /div DIVMeet William Stroop, a young son of the South whose charming voice and mordant observations of family and culture make him one of American literature’s most memorable narrators. In these fourteen interwoven stories, William details the high (and low) points of his family history, focusing particularly on his lazy, scheming father, Morris, his put-upon mother, Martha, and his confidante, Handsome Brown, a young black farmhand. As Morris matches wits with strangers and neighbors alike in constant pursuit of get-rich-quick plans, Martha tries to hold the family together without the aid of any discernable income./divDIV /divDIVTold with the polish and moral resonance of fables, Georgia Boy captures the beauty and tragedy of life in the rural South during the twentieth century./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div

DIVDIVA community lynches a wrongly accused man in Caldwell’s scathing indictment of Southern prejudice/divDIV /divDIVWhen word spreads through Julie County that Sonny Clark, a black man, has assaulted Katy Barlow, a white woman, the man’s fate is sealed. With frightening speed, authorities and an outraged mob align to apprehend Clark and condemn him without trial. By the time Barlow confesses that no crime occurred, it is too late./divDIV /divDIVTold from the multiple perspectives of victim and victimizers as well as passive onlookers, Trouble in July depicts in harrowing detail the tragic ignorance of individuals who fail to understand their roles in a hateful miscarriage of justice./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div

In With All My Might, his definitive autobiography, Caldwell tells about his work as a cotton picker, stagehand, professional football player, and war correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. In 1932, Erskine Caldwell's first novel, Tobacco Road, was the center of controversy. Some critics condemned the book; others considered it to be the work of a genius. Today Caldwell's fifty-plus books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, and his stature as a writer has been firmly established. In With All My Might, his definitive autobiography, Caldwell tells about his work as a cotton picker, stagehand, professional football player, and war correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. He describes his four marriages (including the much-publicized divorce from photographer Margaret Bourke-White). He writes of the sacrifices he made and the rejections he suffered during the years he was struggling to have his work published.

Conversations with Erskine Caldwell contains thirty-two interviews with this major writer, who during his long career enjoyed both the celebrity and the controversy that his books generated. These collected interviews include what is apparently his first, given in 1929 before the publication of The Bastard, to one of the very last, given only weeks before his death in April 1987. Caldwell was a lifelong outspoken opponent of censorship and an early advocate of racial equality. His ideas were reflected in a number of important interviews and portraits, often in newspapers or small journals not easily obtained today. In his later years he became a kind of elder statesman, celebrated as the last of that extraordinary generation of American writers which included Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Steinbeck and which changed the face of American literature. The interviews in this collection reveal Caldwell's attitudes toward the profession of writing. He describes his early years of struggle, his determination to prove himself as a writer, and his tremendous success as the author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, two American classics. He explains his attitude toward the South and his desire to bring about social reform through his writings. He is also candid about his own personal trials, his doubts and beliefs, and the state of his critical reputation.