1 Early Career and Legacy

1.2. Early Career and Legacy.

Over the course of a long career, Erskine Caldwell wrote twelve books of nonfiction, twenty-five novels, and nearly 150 short stories. He was intent on depicting life among the lowly in Georgia and the rest of the South, and his concern for the less fortunate—poor whites and Blacks—shines in his great novels and short stories of the 1930s. This concern also permeates the strongest writing of his later years, his nonfiction works of the 1960s.

Early Life and Education

Born December 17, 1903, in Coweta County, Caldwell was the only child of Caroline “Carrie” Bell, a schoolteacher, and Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian (A.R.P.) Church. Ira’s work led the family to move frequently. By the time Erskine was fifteen, he and his parents had lived in Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee. In the summer of 1919 they moved back to Georgia and settled in Wrens, a small town in Jefferson County about thirty miles south of Augusta. His parents lived there until Ira’s death in 1944.
Erskine was profoundly influenced by his father, a minister and social reformer in a deeply conservative denomination. As a teenager, Erskine helped Ira provide assistance to desperately poor people in east central Georgia. His experiences with his father shaped much of his writing.
Following high school, Caldwell attended Erskine College, an A.R.P. school in South Carolina, and the University of Virginia, among other institutions. He never received a degree, but at the University of Virginia a professor encouraged him to be a writer. Outside class, he met fellow student Helen Lannigan, whom he married early in 1925. During their thirteen-year marriage, they had three children: Erskine Jr., Dabney, and Janet.

Early Career

Caldwell broke into print as a student at the University of Virginia with an essay entitled “The Georgia Cracker” (1926), which contained many of the themes that he later treated in fiction: political demagoguery, racial injustice, depraved religion, cultural sterility, and social irresponsibility. Most of his early fiction was published in short magazines. In spite of their shoestring budgets and small circulations, these magazines exerted an important influence on American literature by encouraging experimentation in form and content.
Two of Caldwell’s early stories caught the attention of a major figure in the literary establishment, Maxwell Perkins, senior editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins read Caldwell’s work at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1931 Scribner’s published American Earth, Caldwell’s first significant book. Among the stories in the collection are “Joe Craddock’s Old Woman,” a poignant vignette of the hardships of farming; “Savannah River Payday,” a telling example of Caldwell’s ability to weave humor and horror; and “Saturday Afternoon,” a gut-wrenching story of a lynching. Introducing his work to a wider audience, American Earth ushered in an extraordinarily productive decade. By 1940 Caldwell had written, among other works, the novels Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre, and Trouble in July; the short-story collection Kneel to the Rising Sun; and the documentary You Have Seen Their Faces.
Included by experts among the 100 most significant novels in English of the twentieth century, Tobacco Road (1932) describes the body-breaking and soul-numbing effects of poverty among Georgia’s tenant farmers during the Great Depression, a description leavened by Caldwell’s dark humor. God’s Little Acre (1933) portrays the abuse of southern industrial workers and the disintegration of a family, both of which are emphasized by a raw rendition of sex. Trouble in July (1940), a searing indictment of a brutal, racist society, depicts a lynching in the wake of mob hysteria aroused by white southern fears of interracial sex.
The short-story collection Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935) contains the writing of an author who was at the height of his powers. Caldwell’s mastery of the short-story form, together with his outrage over social injustice and his great talent, enabled him to write such unforgettable pieces as “The Growing Season,” which poignantly portrays a cotton farmer’s travail, and “Candy-Man Beechum” and “Kneel to the Rising Sun,” both burning condemnations of racism.
In addition to his fiction from the 1930s, Caldwell collaborated in the production of an overwhelmingly powerful work of nonfiction. In the summer of 1936 and again early in 1937 he traveled over the South with the noted photographer Margaret Bourke-White, interviewing people as she took their pictures. The result was You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a combination of forceful writing and memorable photographs. It is a graphic depiction of life among the region’s country people during the Great Depression. Over the course of their travels, Caldwell and Bourke-White fell in love and were married after Caldwell’s wife divorced him.
The marriage lasted only three years. Both Caldwell and Bourke-White were more committed to their work than to their union, and they divorced in 1942. Thereafter, Caldwell married June Johnson, a college student half his age. During their rocky twelve-year marriage, they had one child, a son named Jay. Following his divorce from June, Caldwell married Virginia Fletcher. Their marriage lasted thirty years until his death and equaled the total time of his previous marriages.