Erskine Caldwell

From Philosopedia

Caldwell, Erskine (17 December 1903 - 11 April 1987)

Caldwell, the son of Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a minister in the conservative Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, was born in a house in the woods outside Moreland, Georgia. (A birth certificate was never issued.) His mother, Caroline "Carrie" Bell, was a schoolteacher. Because his father got positions in one church after another, he moved from state to state across the South. By the time Erskine was fifteen, he had accompanied his parents to live in Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee. Although he attended Erskine College in South Carolina and the University of Virginia, he did not graduate. He became a reporter for The Atlanta Journal and later was its literary critic.

In 1925, he married Helen Lannigan, the first of his four wives, and during their thirteen-year marriage they had three children: Erskine Jr., Dabney, and Janet.

Caldwell broke into print as a student at the University of Virginia with an essay entitled "The Georgia Cracker" (1926), which contained many of the themes that he later treated in fiction: political demagoguery, racial injustice, orgiastic religion, cultural sterility, and social irresponsibility.

Caldwell was a proletarian novelist who wrote Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), both of which librarians often hid on special shelves and required permission in order that they be checked out. His depiction of the families' smell of poverty and their raw lust and sexuality titillated the reading public. With his photographer-wife Margaret Bourke-White, he collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1942).

Biographers and literary critics have pointed out that Caldwell's years of observing his father's parishioners and the poor among whom he lived had provided him with a shockingly honest vision of his native region - too honest for many of his Southern compatriots, who would have preferred that he look elsewhere for stories to tell. As a result, he was possibly the most respected and resented Southern author of the early '30s.

Asked his view in 1951 concerning seven connotations of humanism {WAS}, Caldwell replied to Warren Allen Smith,

I prefer leaving critical comment of that nature left to others far better qualified.

Some critics have pointed to Caldwell’s anti-Semitism. But in Deep South, he exposes a fundamentalist Christianity which promises a “better world” that never comes. He includes details of the rituals of snake handling, of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), and bloodletting. With his father, he felt fundamentalism was a dangerous narcotic for poor Southern workers who had little hope or other entertainment. But what readers have liked has been his description of those very people: Jeeter Lester, a sharecropper in Tobacco Road who has fifteen children, who pawns off his own daughter for a turnip; a daughter, Pearl, who was married when only twelve years old; a near-catatonic mother; a grandmother so worthless she is left to die when run over by a car; a dumb son named Dude who marries Sister Bessie Rice, a widowed preacher, when promised he could blow the horn in her new car; and Jeeter’s daughter with the hare-lip:

Ellie May’s upper lip had an opening a quarter of an inch wide that divided one side of her mouth into unequal parts; the slit came to an abrupt end almost under her left nostril. The upper gum was low, and because her gums were always fiery red, the opening in her lip made her look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely.

Caldwell’s fame soared in 1946 when God’s Little Acre was reissued, but after his marriage to Margaret Bourke-White ended - she left him often but once wrote him a cable, saying simply, “My pussy grows cold for you” - he was accused of writing inferior work and many magazines refused to publish his work.

He wrote 55 books including 27 novels, dozens of short stories, and a number of prose selections. By the late 1940s, he had sold more books than any other author in America's history. God's Little Acre had sold well over 14 million copies.

His final book was an autobiography, With All My Might (1987). A smoker all his life, Caldwell died of a tobacco-related illness. Although he respected his parents' conservative religious views, he was a secularist and hedonist, one who exposed fundamentalist Christianity.

Works

Poor Fool (1930)

Tobacco Road (1932)

God's Little Acre (1933)

Journeyman (1935)

The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936)

You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) - With Margaret Bourke-White.

North of the Danube (1939) - With Margaret Bourke-White

Trouble in July (1940)

Say! Is This the U. S. A.? (1941) - With Margaret Bourke-White

Georgia Boy (1943)

Tragic Ground (1944)

The Sure Hand of God (1947)

Call It Experience (1951)

In Search of Bisco (1965)

Deep South (1968)

With All My Might: An Autobiography (1987)

The Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1996)

{WAS, 14 February 1951}