1 Early Career and Legacy

Late Career

After the great work of the 1930s, Caldwell’s fiction declined significantly. The beginning of the decline coincided with the death of his father, who ha d been a steady and enthusiastic source of support and encouragement. The turmoil of his personal life also took its toll. Moreover, he believed that the optimal powers of a creative writer lasted only ten years.
Millions of readers in the late 1940s and the 1950s paid much more attention to Caldwell’s work of the 1930s than to his postwar writing. The paperback revolution in American publishing that began right after World War II (1941-45) exponentially increased the sales of Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre, and others of Caldwell’s 1930s books by packaging those works in ways that obscured their full meaning. Their covers, featuring scantily clad, alluring young women, suggested that sex was the primary focus of the works. Caldwell made a good deal of money from his paperback publishers—at least $200,000 between 1945 and 1951 without writing a word—but his cooperation with them adversely affected his reputation within the literary establishment and helped ensure that his work would be neglected by scholars.
The best work of the latter part of Caldwell’s career is his nonfiction, especially his travel writing. Journeying over the South in the 1960s with his wife, Virginia, he wrote In Search of Bisco (1965) and Deep South (1968). The former deals with race and shows his disappointment with the white South’s opposition to integration. The latter, which explores religion, illustrates his ongoing frustration with white Christians who use their faith to oppose social reform—whether they are holy-rollers in the country or corporate executives in the city.

Legacy

Considering the great volume of Erskine Caldwell’s work, the quality might be expected to be uneven. Much of his early writing is among the best in American literature. That writing lodges in the reader’s memory. One does not forget the characters and circumstances described in Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre, and many of the short stories.
Caldwell’s focus on the issues of class and race was one of the most intense of any other white southern writer of his generation. What distinguishes his best fiction dealing with class is his ability to evoke emotion while avoiding sentimentality. For example, if Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road were only pitiable, then the reader, after feeling sorry for him, could forget him. But because his behavior is so outrageous, it is disturbing and unforgettable.
Notwithstanding the artistic power with which Caldwell invested his delineation of the effects of poverty, his anger and agony over the poison that racism injected into southern life called forth his best work. No rational person, not even a white southerner in the 1930s, could contend that the Black protagonists in such stories as “Saturday Afternoon,” “Candy-Man Beechum,” and “Kneel to the Rising Sun” deserved their terrible fate. Their self-respect and good habits, coupled with white jealousy, got them killed.
Caldwell’s harsh criticism of social injustice in his native region brought forth equally sharp criticism by some white southerners who accused him of being a Communist, a corrupter of morals, and a traitor to the South. At the same time, other southerners commended his artistic skill and his social conscience. Controversy over his writings stalked his career and extended beyond the grave.
Although Caldwell settled outside of Georgia shortly before he was twenty-five, he paid extended visits to his parents in Wrens for as long as they lived there. Later, he returned to Georgia and other southern states on numerous occasions. Though he lived much of his life outside the South, the region stayed on his mind and figured prominently in most of his writing. Nostalgia for his native Georgia found expression when he reached his sixties. As he wrote Governor Lester Maddox with an ironic twist in 1967, “I like to think that I am as much a Georgian as Brer Rabbit.” Nostalgia did not diminish the social concern, however. In his seventies, he asked an old friend at the Atlanta Journal to help with arrangements for a proposed volume that would update You Have Seen Their Faces.
A month before his death on April 11, 1987, Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta issued his final book, an autobiography entitled With All My Might. It is supremely fitting that his farewell was published in his native Georgia, a place that had supplied such rich material about the poor people whose lives he sought to improve.