Caldwell, Erskine

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CALDWELL, ERSKINE

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903–April 11, 1987) was a prolific writer whose novels, stories, and nonfiction about the American South combined burlesque humor, social criticism, brutal violence, and graphic sexuality. He was one of the Depression-era's most prominent and controversial literary figures.

The son of a reform-minded itinerant minister, Caldwell lived in seven southern states by the time he was twelve. Although he never received a high school diploma, he attended the University of Virginia, which he left without a degree in 1925 to work as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal. Dedicated to becoming a professional fiction writer, Caldwell quit the paper in 1926 and moved to Maine, where he lived in dire poverty and obscurity, gradually gaining notice for stories published in several of the era's little magazines.

The central theme of Caldwell's Depressionera writing is the agony of rural impoverishment. His first two novels, Poor Fool (1929) and The Bastard (1930), hard-boiled tales of amoral loners, attracted little critical or popular notice. Caldwell came to literary prominence with the publication of Tobacco Road (1932), the story of a family of destitute Georgia sharecroppers, the Lesters, stubbornly clinging to farmland that has been ruined by soil erosion. Lazy, licentious, and morally depraved, the Lesters' brutal, often obscene behavior culminates when one of the family's sons, Dude, backs his automobile over his grandmother, who is left unattended for hours until she is thrown, still alive, into an open grave. God's Little Acre (1933) narrates the story of the Waldens, another indigent farm family that has been digging futilely for gold on their barren land. The plot, noteworthy for the pornographic rendering of an adulterous sex scene, also includes the proletarian tale of a temporary takeover of a closed mill by the locked-out workers.

The 1933 theatrical adaptation of Tobacco Road, which became the decade's longest-running Broadway play and toured the country, brought Caldwell fame and financial security. The play's popularity outside the South, however, stemmed in part from the fact that the story was often played for comedy rather than social critique, and quite likely reinforced stereotypes about the degeneracy of southerners.

In addition to writing two other novels during the thirties, Journeyman (1935) and Trouble in July (1940), Caldwell also published hundreds of short stories, many about poverty, sex, and racism, in magazines and in five collections, including the critically-acclaimed Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935). In later decades, many of Caldwell's Depression-era novels were released as mass-market paperbacks, with astonishing results. By the early 1960s, he had sold over sixty million books and was being advertised as "the best-selling novelist in the world."

A committed, if idiosyncratic, leftist, Caldwell also wrote journalism designed to expose the horrors of American poverty. A 1935 series for the New York Post described the dire malnutrition suffered by several Georgia families, claiming that "men are so hungry that they eat snakes and cow dung." In 1937, Caldwell collaborated with celebrated photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, whom he would marry in 1939, on the decade's first major photo-essay book, You Have Seen Their Faces, which offered a pointed critique of economic exploitation in the rural South. However, some liberals, including James Agee, contended that Bourke-White's photographs were manipulative and that the book's depiction of the poor was sentimental and condescending.

Throughout his work, Caldwell sought to challenge romantic misconceptions of his native South by exposing the human costs of soil erosion and economic exploitation. However, the exceedingly debased nature of his characters often reinforced stereotypes of poor whites, African Americans, and women, and seemed to place blame on the very people Caldwell saw as victims, rather than on larger social structures. Moreover, the pornographic quality of his writing generated virulent protest, including campaigns to have his work banned in several cities.

Caldwell's work, a volatile blend of social protest, ribald humor, sexual frankness, and shocking violence, defies conventional aesthetic and political categories. He remains one of the Depression era's most enigmatic authors.