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Table of Contents

See Also

Agriculture in the United States

Faulkner, William

Great Depression in the United States

Literature in the United States

Lynching

Racial discrimination

Steinbeck, John

Theater in the United States

Tobacco Road

Wolfe, Thomas

The 1930s in America

Caldwell, Erskine

by Grove Koger

Identification American writer

Caldwell dramatized the desperate plight of the U.S. agrarian underclass in violent and frequently lurid stories and novels, attracting a large readership, dividing critics, and sometimes precipitating legal action.

Georgia-born Erskine Caldwell had already worked as a reporter by the time he enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1923. He married Helen Lannigan in 1925 and, the following year, moved with her to Maine, where he ran a bookstore for a time. Caldwell hoped to be a creative writer and had published a short novel and a handful of stories by the beginning of the 1930’s.

Scribner’s magazine featured two stories by Caldwell in 1930, and noted editor Maxwell Perkins accepted a story collection, American Earth, for publication by Scribner’s Sons the following year. Caldwell returned to Georgia to refresh his memories and observe the devastating impact of the Great Depression on his native state. The novel into which he poured his impressions, Tobacco Road, was published by Scribner’s Sons in 1932. Although it would rank as one of his best works, Tobacco Road was not an immediate success. Readers and critics alike were dismayed by its tragicomic descriptions of chronically poor individuals who had lost everything except the will to survive and the urge to reproduce. However, Jack Kirkland’s 1933 dramatization—which ran for more than seven years in New York City—made Caldwell’s name familiar to a larger public and secured him a measure of financial independence.

When Scribner’s Sons rejected Caldwell’s next novel, which was set in Maine, Caldwell offered a story collection, We Are the Living (1933), and an entirely new novel, God’s Little Acre (1933), to Viking Press. Although its concluding story, “A Country Full of Swedes,” won a Yale Review prize of $1,000, We Are the Living itself made little impact. God’s Little Acre was a different matter. Describing the situation of Ty Ty Walden, a hapless Georgia farmer who spends his time and energy searching vainly for gold rather than raising crops, it quickly attracted the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The resulting charges of pornography were dismissed, but the publicity fueled Caldwell’s growing fame. Critics also found the novel an advance over Tobacco Road.

The novel Journeyman (1935) dealt with an itinerant preacher and was both a bitter attack on fundamentalism and a meditation on the nature of evil. It also marked the beginning of what became an increasingly important concern in Caldwell’s works: the plight of African Americans. That concern was also evident in Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935), a collection whose title story—an account of a lynching—has been recognized not only as Caldwell’s best single work but also as one of the most powerful American short stories ever written.

In 1936, Caldwell toured the South with fledgling photographer Margaret Bourke-White. The immediate result was the moving photo-essay You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), for which Caldwell wrote the text and Bourke-White supplied the illustrations. Next, the two visited eastern Europe, producing another collaboration, North of the Danube (1939). Despite the praise of critics, neither work sold well. In the meantime, Caldwell’s wife had divorced him in 1938, and he and Bourke-White were married in 1939.

Impact

Caldwell’s marriage to Bourke-White ended in 1942, and he married twice more over the ensuing years. He continued writing prolifically until the end of his life, but the 1930’s were the most successful decade of his career. Among Caldwell’s later works, some critics have praised the genial novel Georgia Boy (1943), but the consensus has been that Caldwell was unable to expand his range beyond a limited number of themes, situations, and character types. A generous contract that he signed with paperback publisher New American Library in 1953 also proved problematic, for although the publisher’s many reprints of Caldwell’s books sold well, their frequently lurid covers contributed to the popular view of him as a writer of “cheap” drugstore paperbacks.

Further Reading

1 

Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. Reprint. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

2 

Devlin, James E. Erskine Caldwell. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

3 

McDonald, Robert L., ed. Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.

4 

Stevens, C. J. Storyteller: A Life of Erskine Caldwell. Phillips, Maine: John Wade, 2000.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Koger, Grove. "Caldwell, Erskine." The 1930s in America, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1930_109240801092.
APA 7th
Koger, G. (2011). Caldwell, Erskine. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The 1930s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Koger, Grove. "Caldwell, Erskine." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The 1930s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.