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Whither Caldwell?
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13098 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1987 |
6,514 Words |
| Author
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Liza Mundy
Liza Mundy is a freelance writer living in Charlottesville,
Virginia. |
WITH ALL MY MIGHT
Erskine Caldwell
Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1987
332 pp., $19.95
Once wildly popular, Erskine Caldwell's novels are today consigned to the disappearing five-and-dime or the dim corridors of used bookstores, where for a quarter you can still pick up a paperback edition of Trouble in July or Certain Women. If Caldwell's only distinction was that he was once hailed by Time magazine as "the world's leading best-selling novelist," or that he wrote fifty-five books which together sold 80 million copies in forty-four languages, then this neglect might not be so surprising. Best-selling novelists are often forgotten. But Caldwell was considered a literary writer, discovered by Maxwell Perkins and widely praised in the 1930s, along with Faulkner and Steinbeck, as a heavyweight American writer.
Caldwell's 'New American'
Caldwell, who died this past spring at the age of eighty-four, was, remember, the writer who introduced "tobacco road" to the world, immortalizing it in 1932 as the title of his first full-fledged novel. Since then "tobacco road" has become a virtual synonym for poverty, grim destitution, and even depravity among the poor of the Deep South. With Tobacco Road and the novels that followed, Caldwell introduced a "new American" to the literary world and the nation in general. Caldwell's new American was not heroic or morally uplifting; he was poor, hungry, illiterate, ugly, inarticulate, lecherous, bigoted, and lazy. He was a victim both of circumstance and his
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