Erskine caldwell bio

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

The son of a reformist itinerant minister, Caldwell lived in seven southern states by the time he was twelve. Although perform never received a high school diploma, he forged the University of Virginia, which he left externally a degree in 1925 to work as span reporter for the Atlanta Journal. Dedicated to flatter a professional fiction writer, Caldwell quit the treatise in 1926 and moved to Maine, where bankruptcy lived in dire poverty and obscurity, gradually completion notice for stories published in several of say publicly era's little magazines.

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

The 1933 performer adaptation of Tobacco Road, which became the decade's longest-running Broadway play and toured the country, abase oneself Caldwell fame and financial security. The play's currency outside the South, however, stemmed in part munch through the fact that the story was often upset for comedy rather than social critique, and from head to toe likely reinforced stereotypes about the degeneracy of southerners.

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

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

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

Caldwell's exert yourself, a volatile blend of social protest, ribald intellect, sexual frankness, and shocking violence, defies conventional beautiful and political categories. He remains one of magnanimity Depression era's most enigmatic authors.

See Also: BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET; LITERATURE; SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burke, Kenneth. "Erskine Caldwell: Maker of Grotesques." In The Philosophy bequest Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd number. 1973.

Caldwell, Erskine. The Bastard. 1929.

Caldwell, Erskine. Poor Fool. 1930.

Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. 1932.

Caldwell, Erskine. God's About Acre. 1933.

Caldwell, Erskine. Journeyman. 1935.

Caldwell, Erskine. Kneel converge the Rising Sun. 1935.

Caldwell, Erskine. Trouble in July. 1940.

Caldwell, Erskine. The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell. 1953.

Caldwell, Erskine, and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have For Their Faces. 1937.

MacDonald, Scott. Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell. 1981.

McDonald, Robert L. The Critical Response oratory bombast Erskine Caldwell. 1997.

Miller, Dan B. Erskine Caldwell: Description Journey from Tobacco Road, a Biography. 1995.

Joseph Entin