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"I'm just an ordinary writer," Erskine Caldwell once wrote. "I'm not trying to sell anything; I'm not trying to buy anything. I'm just trying to present my vision of life." His ostensibly unsolicitous vision of Southern grotesques, of the slack-jawed, pellagra-ridden sharecroppers, repressed farmwives, and oversexed nymphets, elicited, however, anything but an "ordinary" response. Hailed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, reviled by others as a pornographer or sensationalist, Caldwell was once called "America's most popular author." Once the furor flagged, Caldwell was relegated to the "mansions of subliterature," where his reputation resides today. This book contains more than 150 previously unpublished letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955, at the peak of Caldwell's popularity and influence, all extensively annotated. The Introduction assays Caldwell's significance in American popular culture and literary studies and establishes the importance of Caldwell's correspondence as a means of understanding the intentions of a man who was otherwise terse and unforthcoming about his work.
DIVDIVAmerican master Erskine Caldwell’s powerful classic stories of anger, humor, insight, and hope for the South /divDIV /divDIVAuthor of some of the most widely banned fiction of the twentieth century, Erskine Caldwell had a talent for striking a nerve. In this collection of nearly one hundred stories, the full depth and scope of his talent is on display, including his trademark biting satire as well as his skill at rendering deeply moving portraits of his native South./divDIV /divDIVIn a career that spanned over six decades, Caldwell produced stories that serve to document a changing society, from the dehumanizing trials of the Great Depression through the transformative battle to desegregate the South. Taken together, his short fiction reveals a voice that remains essential for readers hoping to understand the American experience. /divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div
Since the 1930s, Erskine Caldwell's writings have provoked laughter and pathos, curiosity and disbelief. His perplexing characters, comically motivated only by their instincts for survival, allowed Caldwell to illustrate the duality of human nature as he explored the social issues of his times in such celebrated novels as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Behind Caldwell's social protest and his comic characters lay a man whose life imitated art. A rural southerner who later moved among the movie industry's famous and powerful, Caldwell led a life as compelling as any of his fiction. As Harvey Klevar weaves the threads of this life into the cultural tapestry of the times, he explores the m...
Conversations with Erskine Caldwell contains thirty-two interviews with this major writer, who during his long career enjoyed both the celebrity and the controversy that his books generated. These collected interviews include what is apparently his first, given in 1929 before the publication of The Bastard, to one of the very last, given only weeks before his death in April 1987. Caldwell was a lifelong outspoken opponent of censorship and an early advocate of racial equality. His ideas were reflected in a number of important interviews and portraits, often in newspapers or small journals not easily obtained today. In his later years he became a kind of elder statesman, celebrated as the las...
Miller offers a fresh reassessment of Caldwell's place in the national literary canon. Drawing on private letters, interviews with family members and friends, and contemporary criticism, he traces with narrative grace and style the sometimes tumultuous, yet always compelling, path of a true American original. Photos.