Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell in 1975
Born	Erskine Preston Caldwell December 17, 1903 Moreland, Georgia, U.S.
Died	Paradise Valley, Arizona, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Notable works	Tobacco Road God's Little Acre

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903 – April 11, 1987) was an American author. 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 Southerners of the time who felt he was deprecating the people of the region.

Early years

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small community White Oak in Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his schoolteacher wife Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell. Rev. Caldwell's ministry necessitated moving the family throughout the South, including the states of Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When he was 15 years old, his family settled in Wrens, Georgia. His mother Carrie was from Virginia. Her ancestry included English nobility which held large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English ancestors and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell's ancestors were Scots-Irish and had also been in the country since before the revolution and had fought in it.

Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine College, a Presbyterian affiliated school nearby in South Carolina. His political sympathies lay with the working classes and he used his experiences with farmers and common workers to write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life he presented public seminars on the typical conditions of tenant-sharecroppers in the South.

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 during (parts of) the 1930s and 40s. His first book was banned and copies were seized by authorities. With the publication of God's Little Acre, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated legal action against him in New York. Caldwell was arrested when he attended a book-signing there but was exonerated in trial.

Through the 1930s Caldwell and his first wife Helen managed a bookstore in Maine. Following their divorce Caldwell married photographer Margaret Bourke-White, collaborating with her on three photo-documentaries: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), North of the Danube (1939), and Say, Is This The USA (1941) during their three years together from 1939–42. 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.

Later years

Erskine Caldwell in 1975

After he returned from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in San Francisco. 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 in the town square of Moreland, Georgia, where the home in which he was born was relocated and dedicated to his memory.

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. Although he never lived there, his stepson and fourth wife, Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, did, and wished him to be buried near his family.

Bibliography

Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, twelve nonfiction collections, two autobiographies, and two books for young readers. He also edited the influential American Folkways series, a 28-volume series of books about different regions of the United States.

• The Bastard (1929)
• Poor Fool (1930)
• "American Earth", short story (1931)
• Tobacco Road (1932)
  • Tobacco Road (The Play) — adaptation by Jack Kirkland, based on the novel
• 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 Guerrilla 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)
• Place Called Estherville (1949)
  File:PlaceCalledEsthervillepaperback.JPG

  1959 paperback of Place Called Estherville (1949)
• A Swell Looking Girl
• Episode in Palmetto (1950)
• The Humorous Side of Erskine Caldwell, edited by Robert Cantwell (1951)
• Call It Experience, autobiography (1951)
• The Courting of Susie Brown, short stories (1952)
• A Lamp for Nightfall (1952)
• The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1953)
• Love and Money (1954)
• 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 Seduction Of Emily Brown", short story (1965)
• "The Seduction Of Mr. Sears", short story (1965)
• The Deer at Our House, children's book (1966)
• "Strange Bedmates", short story (1966)
• Writing in America, essay (1967)
• Miss Mama Aimee (1967)
• "Wife for a Hot Afternoon", short story (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)

External links

• The Papers of Erskine P. Caldwell in the Dartmouth College Library
• New Georgia Encyclopedia: Erskine Caldwell
• Erskine Caldwell Birthplace and Museum
• Wade Publishing, Publisher of Storyteller: A Life of Erskine Caldwell
• Article by Sylvia J. Cook
• Phil Thomas' review of the 1983 Caldwell stort story collection "Stories of Life North & South", in the July 10, 1983 issue of The Ledger
• "Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative" by Carl Bode
• "Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative" by Carl Bode (2)
• Georgia Writers Hall of Fame: Erskine Caldwell
• Erskine Caldwell at Find a Grave
• Works by Erskine Caldwell at Project Gutenberg