Tobacco Road

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Tobacco Road, novel by Erskine Caldwell, published in 1932. The sensational dramatization by Jack Kirkland (1933) had a continuous run of 3182 Broadway performances.

In the squalid, cotton‐raising backcountry of contemporary Georgia live the sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his miserable, starving family, which includes his sick wife Ada, his neglected mother, his 16‐year‐old son Dude, and his repulsive, hare‐lipped daughter Ellie May. Nearby lives the railroad worker Lov Benson, who has recently married Jeeter's 12‐year‐old daughter Pearl. Lov comes to ask Jeeter's aid in forcing the unwilling Pearl to sleep with him, and, while Lov's attention is diverted by the sex‐hungry Ellie May, Jeeter steals the turnips that Lov has been carrying. The Lesters devour Lov's turnips, being joined by ugly Sister Bessie Rice, a widowed preacher who then leads them in penitential prayer. It is six years since Jeeter has been able to plant cotton, because he has neither money nor credit to buy seed and fertilizer. A “born” farmer, he stubbornly persists on his sterile acres, refusing to seek work in town as most of his 15 children have already done. Sister Bessie, who wants a husband to help her preach and “for other purposes,” induces Dude to marry her by buying a new automobile. Subsequent events include futile attempts by Jeeter to obtain credit, further sexual diversions by the entire group, and the rapid ruin of the new auto, owing to Dude's ignorance and reckless driving, which also result in the accidental deaths of Jeeter's mother and a black farmer. Pearl runs away to find work and escape her husband's attempt to rape her, and Ellie May goes to live with Lov. Jeeter and Ada are left alone one night. The house catches fire and burns to the ground, ending their oppressed and degraded lives.

Tobacco Road (1933), a play by Jack Kirkland. [Masque Theatre, 3,182 perf.] The Lesters are a shabby, worthless family of sharecroppers who have lost the land their ancestors had long farmed in a desultory fashion. Jeeter Lester ( Henry Hull) is the shiftless head of the family. He has sold his oldest daughter for seven dollars, and when her husband, Lov Besney ( Dean Jagger), comes to complain that she will not consummate the marriage, Jeeter allows his other daughter, Ellie May ( Ruth Hunter), to run off with Lov. His son, Dude ( Sam Byrd), marries a neighbor who has enough money to let him buy an old car. When Dude's mother, Ada ( Margaret Wycherly), berates her son, he runs her over and kills her. Jeeter seems indifferent to all this, just sitting on his stoop and rubbing dirt with his hand. Based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell, the play was assailed by almost every critic. Richard Lockridge of the Sun typified much of the revulsion when he referred to the work as “a play that achieves the repulsive and seldom falls below the faintly sickening.” To the surprise of the show‐wise, the play became the longest‐running drama up to its time. Recent revivals tend to play the old play for laughs. Jack KIRKLAND (1902–69) was born in St. Louis and was represented on Broadway as author and/or producer of ten plays. His only other success was I Must Love Someone (1939), a fictionalized account of the famous Florodora girls, written with Leyle Georgie.