Caldwell, Erskine, 1903-1987

Erskine Preston Caldwell was born in White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia, the son of Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a minister, and Caroline Bell, a teacher. Caldwell much later believed that being brought up as a minister's son in the Deep South was "my good fortune in life," for his family's frequent moves to different congregations in the region gave him an intimate knowledge of the people, localities, and ways of life that would inform his fiction and documentary writing. As a youth he observed, with his father's active encouragement, the "antics and motivations" of the southern poor in their pursuit of material and spiritual satisfaction. He noted the quirks of sexual, social, and race relationships in the world around him and listened avidly to stories told in his family and community. Eventually he decided that his main goal in life was to become a storyteller himself. Caldwell attended Erskine College, in South Carolina, and also took courses at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania between 1920 and 1925. He served a more practical apprenticeship to writing as a newspaper reporter for the Atlanta Journal; as a book reviewer for the Journal, the Houston Post, and the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer; and by practicing his craft in scores of essays, poems, jokes, stories, and novels, which he submitted, largely unsuccessfully, for publication during the late 1920s. In 1925 he married Helen Lannigan, with whom he later had two sons and a daughter. His first novel, The Bastard, was published in 1929, followed by a second, Poor Fool, in 1930; but later he preferred to acknowledge the short story collection American Earth (1931) as his first book. The stories in this collection, many of which first appeared in little experimental magazines, revealed many of the qualities and preoccupations that would characterize Caldwell's later writing: a grimly deterministic view of human existence qualified by a burlesque sense of its absurdity; a keen interest in the manipulation of power between men and women, whites and blacks, rich and poor; a considerable disposition toward vulgar comedy and gothic violence; and a starkly simple prose style that depended for its impact on startling patterns of imagery and choral repetitions. With his next two novels, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Caldwell achieved not only critical and popular success, but also some notoriety. Both books were set among the poor whites of his southern childhood, and both displayed a mixture of muckraking anger and grotesque sexual behavior that upset southern loyalists and northern moralists alike. Despite or because of this, Tobacco Road, adapted for the stage by Jack Kirkland, ran on Broadway for over seven and a half years, and God's Little Acre, after a highly publicized obscenity trial, became one of Caldwell's perennial bestsellers.