Erskine Caldwell: Beyond Tobacco Road

A look today at the much-neglected progressive Southern author Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), born 120 years ago today. Caldwell was decidedly not neglected in his own time; that’s the whole point. His most popular books and adaptations thereof broke records; we’ve had dozens of occasions to mention his most famous one on this blog. To sell that point, we’ll talk about the famous works first, and then more about the man himself.

Caldwell’s third novel Tobacco Road (1932), a sensationalist and grotesque tragicomedy of Southern sharecroppers, sold 10 million copies and in its day was considered one of the 20th century’s most important novels.

Caldwell was the son of a charity-minded preacher and a well educated schoolteacher. The family moved around constantly; as a boy he had lived in Georgia, Virginia, both Carolinas, Tennessee, and Florida and moved among the poor. My father’s father was a Tennessee sharecropper, and my dad grew up one of the very same kind of hand-to-mouth farms depicted in this book, so I have always been drawn to descriptions of those conditions. In the ’30s, readers and audiences regarded such material with something like fascinated horror, the rural equivalent of slumming. The characters in Tobacco Road include the patriarch Jeeter Lester (whose ingenious hillbilly name also evokes the French word Jeter, “to throw away”), his wife Ada, a teenager named Dude, Grandma, Ellie May, and Pearl. Among the book’s more appalling elements, a 12 year old bride, and a preacher woman named Sister Bessie who has no nose. So it’s a mixed bag. Caldwell had a good deal of compassion, but also managed to be the source of many “white trash” stereotypes. (In related news, Caldwell shared a birthday with George “Goober” Lindsey).

A 1933 Broadway adaptation, followed by two immediate revivals kept the property alive for New York audiences for a decade. At the time, it was the longest-running Broadway show ever. Then came a 1941 Hollywood screen adaptation directed by John Ford, and then another Broadway revival in 1950. Some of the famous people who have played the plum role of Jeter onstage include Henry Hull, James Barton, and Will Geer. The movie version, which emphasized the low comedy aspects, had Charley Grapewyn (fresh off The Wizard of Oz and The Grapes of Wrath) as Jeter, with Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney,Ward Bond,William Tracy, Elizabeth Patterson,Dana Andrews, and Slim Summerville.

There was a still later iteration. The great John D. Loudermilk came out with his song “Tobacco Road” in 1959. The proto-punk garage band The Nashville Teens had a major pop hit with it in 1964, and it became part of the standard modern rock ‘n’ roll repertoire. It has little to do with Caldwell’s novel per se, but describes a similar milieu.

Caldwell’s next novel God’s Little Acre (1933) sold even more copies (14 million), in spite of the fact that it was widely banned, mostly because it was typically marketed as a sexy potboiler. It has the same kind of setting as Tobacco Road but was considered too racy for a similar stage or screen adaptation until 1958, when the movie came out, directed by Anthony Mann. More on that film is in my earlier post here.

In 1937 Caldwell teamed up with his then-wife Margaret Bourke-White to create the book You Have Seen Their Faces, combining pictorial and literary essays describing the lives of poor sharecroppers, both black and white. It surely was the model for James Agee’s later and more avant-garde collaboration with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

From 1941 to 1955, Caldwell was the editor of the American Folkways series of regional travel books. All told, he wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, 12 nonfiction books (including travel writing, foreign correspondence, war correspondence, and essays on politics and social conditions), as well as memoirs, and even kids books. He reported from the USSR during World War Two, and once he was established as a writer lived in such diverse American locales as Maine, San Francisco, Connecticut, and the Arizona desert. He attended a variety of colleges in his youth including Erskine College in South Carolina (named, like him, after the Scottish Presbyterian minister Ebeneezer Erskine), the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia, which he attended on a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In his younger years, he had worked all over the country as a factory worker, farmhand, cook, journalist (at the Atlanta Journal) and even a scenery shifter in a burlesque house, which clearly seemed to inform his sense of humor.

Some of Caldwell’s other books were made into films. His 1958 novel Claudelle Inglish was made into a 1961 film with Arthur Kennedy, Diana McBain, Will Hutchins, Constance Ford, and Claude Akins. His very first novel The Bastard (1929) was made into the 1983 French film Le bâtard. In 2004 there was an indie adaptation of his 1947 novel The Sure Hand of God.

Lung cancer took Caldwell at the age of 83. “Tobacco Road”, indeed.