Erskine Caldwell

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Erskine Caldwell photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1938

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903 – April 11, 1987) was an American author.[1][2] His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South in novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was deprecating the people of the region.

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Early years [edit]

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903 in a house in a wooded area outside Moreland, Georgia. He was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his schoolteacher wife Caroline Bell Caldwell. Rev. Caldwell's ministry necessitated moving the family to various southern states, including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When Erskine was 15 years old, the family settled permanently in Wrens, Georgia.[3]

Later, he attended, but did not graduate from Erskine College. He was six feet tall, athletic, and played football. His political sympathies were with the working class, and he used his experiences with common workers to write books that extolled the simple life of those less fortunate than he was. Later in life, he gave seminars on low-income tenant-sharecroppers in the South.[3]

His first and second published works were The Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930) but the works for which he is most famous are his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). Maxim Lieber was his literary agent, 1932–1943 and 1947–1948.

When his first book was published, it was banned and copies were seized by authorities. Later, with the publication of God's Little Acre, authorities, at the instigation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (apparently incensed at Caldwell's choice of title), arrested Caldwell and seized his copies when he went to New York for a book-signing event. A trial exonerated Caldwell,[4] and he counter-sued for false arrest and malicious prosecution.[citation needed]

Through the 1930s, Caldwell and his wife Helen managed a bookstore in Maine. Caldwell was married to photographer Margaret Bourke-White from 1939 to 1942, and they collaborated on three photo-documentaries: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), North of the Danube (1939), and Say, Is This The USA (1941).

Disillusionment with the anti-revisionist socialist government had led him to compose an eleven-page short story, "Message for Genevieve," published in 1933. In this story, a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on charges of espionage. During World War II, Caldwell obtained papers from the USSR that allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent documenting the war effort there.

After he returned from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in San Francisco. His ex-wife kept the bookstore in Maine as a property settlement.

During the last twenty years of his life, his routine was to travel the world for six months of each year, taking with him notebooks in which to jot down his ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published, but can be examined in a museum dedicated to him: The house in which he was born was moved from its original site and preserved, and was made into a museum in the town square of Moreland, Georgia.

Caldwell died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He is interred in Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon.[5] Though he never lived there, his stepson and fourth wife did, and wished him to be buried near his family.[6]

Bibliography [edit]

Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, 12 nonfiction collections, as well as 2 books for young readers.[7]

  • The Bastard (1929)
  • Poor Fool (1930)
  • "American Earth", short story (1931)
  • Tobacco Road (1932)
  • We Are the Living, collection of short stories (1933)
  • God's Little Acre (1933)
  • Tenant Farmers, essay (1935)
  • Some American People, essay (1935)
  • Journeyman (1935)
  • Kneel to the Rising Sun, short stories (1935)
  • The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936)
  • "Saturday Afternoon", short story (1936)
  • You Have Seen Their Faces (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1937)
  • "Southways", short story (1938)
  • North of the Danube (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1939)
  • Trouble in July (1940)
  • Say Is This the USA (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1941)
  • Moscow Under Fire, foreign correspondence (1942)
  • Russia at War, foreign correspondence (1942)
  • All-Out on the Road to Smolensk, foreign correspondence (1942)
  • All Night Long (1942), subtitled A Novel of Guerilla Warfare in Russia
  • Georgia Boy (1943)
  • Tragic Ground (1944)
  • A House in the Uplands (1946)
  • The Sure Hand of God (1947)
  • This Very Earth (1948)
  • A Place Called Estherville (1949)
    1959 paperback of Place Called Estherville (1949)
  • A Swell Looking Girl
  • The Humorous Side of Erskine Caldwell, (1951) edited by Robert Cantwell
  • Episode in Palmetto (1950)
  • Call It Experience, autobiography (1951)
  • The Courting of Susie Brown, short stories (1952)
  • A Lamp for Nightfall (1952)
  • Love and Money (1954)
  • The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1953)
  • Gretta (1955)
  • Gulf Coast Stories, short stories (1956)
  • Certain Women, short stories (1957)
  • Claudelle Inglish (1958)
  • Molly Cottontail, children's book (1958)
  • When You Think of Me, short stories (1959)
  • Jenny by Nature (1961)
  • Men and Women, short stories (1961)
  • "Close to Home" (1962)
  • The Last Night of Summer (1963)
  • "All About America" (1964)
  • In Search of Bisco, travel writing (1965)
  • The Deer at Our House, children's book (1966)
  • Writing in America, essay (1967)
  • Miss Mama Aimee (1967)
  • "Summertime Island" (1968)
  • Deep South, travel writing (1968)
  • Annette (1973)
  • Afternoons in Mid America, essays (1976)
  • With All My Might, autobiography (1987)
  • Erskine Caldwell: Selected Letters, 1929–1955, edited by Robert L. McDonald (1999)

Notes [edit]

  1. ^ Obituary New York Times, 13 April 1987.
  2. ^ Obituary Variety 15 April 1987
  3. ^ a b "Erskine Caldwell". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 21, 2012. 
  4. ^ "SUMNER DEFEATED IN FIGHT ON A BOOK: Magistrate Greenspan Finds Novel by Erskine Caldwell Is Not Obscene". The New York Times (in ProQuest ID 100709788). May 24, 1933. p. 19. 
  5. ^ "Scenic Hills Memorial Park". Find A Grave. Retrieved 2011-09-29. 
  6. ^ "Novelist Erskine Caldwell’s Ashes Rest in Ashland, Ore.". Jefferson Public Radio. Retrieved 2012-03-14. 
  7. ^ "Storyteller: A Life of Erskine Caldwell". Johnwade.com. Retrieved 2011-09-29. 

References [edit]

External links [edit]

Authority control
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