Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre | New Georgia Encyclopedia Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre Original entry by Edwin T. Arnold , Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, 07/16/2002 Last edited by NGE Staff on 05/16/2016 Explore This Article The Film Although Erskine Caldwell wrote more than sixty books, twenty-five novels among them, he is best known for two works of long fiction, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). Tobacco Road was named one of the Modern Library's 100 best novels of the twentieth century, and God's Little Acre remains Caldwell's single most popular work, having sold more than 10 million copies. Along with the less well-known Journeyman (1935), these books make up a serio-comic trilogy of Georgia life in the first half of the twentieth century. They detail the ruination of the land, the growth of textile mills , and the abiding influence of fundamentalist religion in the South.

These books thus present a radical contrast to the traditionally genteel and romantic views of the region, popularized most notably by Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind (1936). Tobacco Road Erskine Caldwell by Charles Scribner and Sons in 1932, was Caldwell's third novel. It was inspired by the terrible poverty he witnessed as a young man growing up in the small east Georgia town of Wrens. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, who was pastor of the local Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, was also an amateur sociologist and often took his son with him to observe some of the more destitute members of the rural community. Erskine Caldwell's sympathy for these people and his outrage at the conditions in which they lived were real, and his novel was meant to be a work of social protest. But he also refused to sentimentalize their poverty or to cast his characters as inherently noble in their sufferings, as so many other protest works did. The novel's Lester family, headed by the shiftless patriarch Jeeter, both appall and intrigue readers with their gross sexuality, casual violence, selfishness, and overall lack of decency.

Living as squatters on barren land that had once belonged to their more prosperous ancestors, the Lesters have come to represent in the American public's mind the degradation inherent in extreme poverty. That Caldwell also portrays them as often-comic figures further complicates the reader's response. Tobacco Road is a call to action, but it offers no easy answers and thus has generated intense debate both in and out of the South. Many southerners denounced the novel as exaggerated and needlessly cruel and even pornographic, an affront to the gentility of the region. Northern critics, however, tended to read the book as a serious indictment of a failed economic system in need of correction. Caldwell later explained that the book was not meant to represent the entire South, but for many this work confirmed demeaning southern stereotypes. The Play and Film The stage version of Tobacco Road was written by Jack Kirkland and opened on December 4, 1933, at the Masque Theatre in New York City. Caldwell had little to do with the play version and initially felt it would fail.

First reviews were mixed, and after a month of sporadic attendance, the play moved to the 48th Street Theater, where it slowly became a word-of-mouth success. With Henry Hull as the first of five actors who would play Jeeter Lester, Tobacco Road ran for more than seven years, through 3,182 performances. When it closed on May 31, 1941, it had become the longest-running play in the history of the Broadway stage up to that time. Road shows took the play to cities throughout the nation and later into foreign countries. In 1934 Chicago mayor Edward F. Kelly declared the play obscene and closed it down. The producers sued, and in a major court case, the play was allowed to continue. This was the first of numerous attempts to censor the show, which was often taken to court or banned during its many runs. Caldwell tirelessly defended the play and the book and, in the process, became a leading advocate for artistic freedom and First Amendment rights. In 1940 Darryl F.

Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox, which had just produced John Ford's classic film version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, bought the screen rights to Tobacco Road. Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (a Georgia native) attempted to preserve the caustic comedy and social protest of the book and play, but the studio overruled them on central issues, specifically the tragic ending. The result was a sentimental burlesque that Caldwell himself disavowed. Starring Charley Grapewin, repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester, the film was released in 1941. It enjoyed initial success but is now considered one of Ford's lesser movies, a poor relative of his great work in The Grapes of Wrath. God's Little Acre The Novel God's Little Acre was published by Viking Press in 1933, one year after the publication of Tobacco Road. In it, Caldwell shifts his sights to the industrialized South. Influenced in part by the textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, he considered this work to be a "proletarian" novel dealing with the plight of workers deprived of union protection.

It was intended to support these mill hands, or "lintheads," as they were sometimes called. Will Thompson, who leads the strike, represents both the inherent power and the frustration of the working class. When Thompson is killed by guards as he attempts to reopen the mill shut down by its ruthless owners, his death becomes a rallying cry; and his corpse is borne through the streets, but the mills remain closed. The book also examines the misuse of the land and other natural resources. Ty Ty Walden, who (unlike Jeeter Lester) still owns his farm, spends his time digging for gold instead of farming the rich soil . His delusion and the tragedy it brings to his family again illustrate the waste Caldwell saw in southern attitudes toward the land. Like Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre contains scenes of explicit sexuality. In April 1933 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took Caldwell and Viking Press to court for dissemination of pornography. More than sixty authors, editors, and literary critics rallied in support of the book, and Judge Benjamin Greenspan of the New York Magistrates Court ruled in its favor. The court case is still considered a major decision in the establishment of artists' First Amendment rights in freedom of expression.

The book became a worldwide best-seller and remains today one of the most popular novels ever published. The Film In 1958 director Anthony Mann and screenwriter Phillip Yordan, in collaboration with Caldwell, made the film version of God's Little Acre, starring Robert Ryan as Ty Ty Walden and Aldo Ray as Will Thompson. The film, like the book, was considered scandalous and became one of the top-grossing movies for that year. Truer to its source than John Ford's Tobacco Road had been, God's Little Acre remains the best representation of Caldwell on film. You Might Also Like Click here to read more from Slate's "Pulp Fiction" week. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, published in 1932, is a greasy hairball of a novel—one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the American South. It's about as nutritious as a plate of pork cracklings. You're going to feel a little ill when you get up from this table. And I mean all of this, I think, in a good way. It's cheating, really, to call Tobacco Road a pulp novel.

The book—Caldwell's third—was first issued between hard covers by a respectable publisher, Scribner's, and was edited by the more-than-respectable Maxwell Perkins. Its early admirers included Faulkner and Malcolm Cowley. Saul Bellow thought Caldwell should have won the Nobel Prize. But within a decade or two, as Caldwell's books got crummier and crummier (take a look at Episode in Palmetto), he morphed into this country's best-selling dime-store novelist. By the 1940S and '50s, when most readers encountered Tobacco Road, the novel existed mostly in cheap mass-market editions with increasingly eye-popping covers. Out came the heaving cleavage and the intimations of hillbilly degeneracy. Gone were the respectable plaudits. Erskine Caldwell had been, largely of his own volition, Pulp'd. Advertisement Yet Tobacco Road's cultural reach—thanks in part to a folksy Broadway version of the novel—is long and complicated.

You can trace the intensity of Caldwell's vision in Tobacco Road right up through the undervalued and largely out-of-print novels of Harry Crews, and even through those of—though it is mildly heretical to say this— Cormac McCarthy . Without Tobacco Road, it's almost impossible to imagine the arrival of Hee-Haw and The Beverly Hillbillies, not to mention Deliverance. Tobacco Road, set in a fictionalized version of Caldwell's home town, lays bare the story of the Lesters, the poorest, whitest, trashiest, horniest family in rural Georgia. Jeeter, the Lester family patriarch in Tobacco Road, is a beaten-down sharecropper who can no longer get credit to buy the supplies he needs to farm. His family survives, in their crumbling shack, on fat-back rinds and corn meal. Ada, his wife, is wasting away from pellagra; Dude, their 16-year-old son, is a half-wit; Ellie May, their voluptuous 18-year-old daughter, has a gruesome hairlip that makes her "look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely." Jeeter and Ada's other surviving children got out as quickly as they could.

Base instincts are the only kind the Lesters seem to have. The book opens with a visit from Lov, Jeeter's son-in-law, who's distraught that his 13-year-old wife, Pearl (Jeeter's daughter), won't sleep with him. (Jeeter had sold the girl to him for $7, some cylinder oil, and a few quilts.) He wants help tying Pearl to the bed. The starving Lesters, though, are more interested in getting their hands on the sack of turnips Lov is carrying, and ultimately they do—but not until Ellie May has distracted Lov by sliding her naked bottom toward him across the dirt yard in what will become one of the most tragicomically nasty rape-seduction scenes ever put to paper. "Ellie May's acting like your old hound used to do when he got the itch," Dude says to Lester. "Look at her scrape her bottom on the sand. That old hound used to make the same kind of sound Ellie May's making, too. It sounds just like a little pig squealing, don't it?" Advertisement From here, the grotesqueries pile up and up.

Dude marries a widowed, lecherous, and much older female preacher—her nose is deformed and looking into her nostrils is like "looking down the end of a double-barrel shotgun"—only because he wants to honk the horn on her new car. There are scenes involving rats and corpses; elsewhere, the female preacher is passed around like a sex doll among the men at a fleabag hotel, while Dude and Jeeter sleep in a nearby room; finally, Jeeter, in a futile attempt to clear his land for farming, accidentally kills himself and his wife when a fire he's set burns down their shack. Clearly, there's a muchness here, a flood of overwrought melodrama that we associate more with pulp fiction than with literary endeavor. Caldwell thought he was merely writing no-holds-barred realism. He wanted the novel to be, as Dan B. Miller notes in his gripping 1995 biography, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey From Tobacco Road, a rebuke to the perfumed "moonlight and magnolias" literature of the south. Yet it's almost impossible to not to read the most ludicrously grim passages of Tobacco Road as very black humor.

It can be hard to keep a straight face when encountering bits of dialogue like this: "Look at them two big holes running down into her face—how does she keep it from raining down in there, you reckon?" "I'll be damned if I know. Maybe she puts cork stoppers in them to keep the water out." Caldwell didn't see himself as a comic writer, though. According to Miller, if anyone suggested that his novel made them laugh, Caldwell stalked out of the room. Certainly readers in the South didn't see anything comic about Tobacco Road. While it was published to generally strong reviews, Southerners mostly deplored it. They thought of Caldwell the same way they thought of Faulkner: as a regional traitor, a writer who exposed them as primitives. Tobacco Road was banned for decades in high-school libraries in Caldwell's home town. The local police chief said that if Caldwell ever came crawling back, he'd run him out of town on a rail. Tobacco Road is not, thank God, unrelievedly bleak.

While alive, Jeeter never completely loses hope he'll farm again, and Caldwell awkwardly and self-consciously offers up digressions on topics such as how the Jeeters' poverty could have been prevented. But as Caldwell arranges for his characters to engage in ever more absurd actions, he can remind you of Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter, careering around with LOVE tattooed on one set of bruised knuckles and HATE on the other, pummeling everything he claims to love into submission. So, why did Tobacco Road find a place on the Modern Library's list of the Best 100 Novels in the English Language—at No. 91, between Midnight's Children and Ironweed? The reasons have nothing to do with the blinkered cultural stereotypes Caldwell locked into cement and everything to do with the fact that few novels have as much stripped-down force and inspire as much terror and pity. The force comes from that fact that Caldwell's id—his naked obsessions with sex, class, and violence—cuts the surface of every page like a dorsal fin. You can't stop turning the pages, because you want to see how much further your jaw can drop.

The terror and pity arise from the fact that, as ham-fisted and exploitative as his attempts could be, Caldwell really did want to bring Americans some news: news about how the worst-off of the rural poor really lived. Pulp novel? Maybe. The pulpiest—and arguably the most unforgettable—Southern novel you'll ever read? Yep. American Dreams: ‘Tobacco Road’ by Erskine Caldwell - The Daily Beast ‘Tobacco Road’ American Dreams: ‘Tobacco Road’ by Erskine Caldwell Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road dramatizes a Georgian sharecropper family made cruel and vile by debilitating poverty. Nathaniel Rich writes that it shows just how much the intellectual preoccupations of the ’20s were swept aside by the Great Depression. Nathaniel Rich 04.30.12 8:45 AM ET As a comedy, Tobacco Road is a modest failure; as a tragedy, it’s an abject failure. And yet Erskine Caldwell’s novel, 80 years after its publication, remains a giddy, obscene joy. It as indelible as a freak show or car crash.

Nobody knew what to make of Caldwell in 1932, and nobody much talks about him now, but his legacy persists. He is a progenitor of what could be called the degenerate school of American fiction. Descendents include writers like William S. Burroughs, Harry Crews, Katherine Dunn, and Barry Gifford. Tobacco Road is crass and deranged and irreducibly American. The novel received censorious reviews upon publication, but after it was adapted into a play in 1935 and became the longest-running show in the history of Broadway, it went on to sell 10 million copies. It is not surprising that critics were made uneasy by the story of the Lesters (rhymes with festers, molesters, and incesters), a family of cruel, illiterate savages in west-central Georgia. In the early years of the Great Depression, the intellectual preoccupations of the ’20s were swiftly discarded. No longer did artists and critics gripe that America was a mechanized, standardized, puritanical country, governed by Babbitts, prudes, and dimwitted businessmen.

As Frederick Lewis Allen writes in Since Yesterday , his history of America in the ’30s, the conversation had turned, with a thud, to economic reform. It was held that “the masses of the citizenry were the people who really mattered, the most fitting subjects for writer and artist, the people on whose behalf reform must be undertaken.” Writers needed to depict conditions as they were for the most unfortunate members of society—that was the only way to bring about social change. It was an innocent time in America, and writers still believed that fiction could bring about change. The Lesters, at first glance, seem the ideal heroes of a Depression-era novel. They are poor; “dirt poor” is no exaggeration, for their land has been depleted by cotton farming and untilled for seven years. Seventy-five years earlier, grandfather Lester had owned a great tobacco plantation, but the property has long since been sold off to creditors. The Lesters only remain on their small parcel thanks to the pity of its new owner. Their house, which has never been painted, is sagging and rotted and porous. Sections of ceiling fall away every time it rains. Jeeter Lester, the patriarch, has 12 surviving children.

He doesn’t remember most of their names. All but two have left and never returned. Since Lester cannot afford to rent a mule or basic farming supplies, his main income comes from selling his daughters into marriage. He trades Pearl, 12, to a neighbor for some quilts, not quite a gallon of cylinder oil, and $7. Jeeter lives with his wife, Ada, who suffers from pellagra and spends her days daydreaming about buying a nice dress in which to be buried; his mother, whom nobody talks to, except to tell her “to get out of the way, or to stop eating the bread and meat”; a big stupid son, Dude, 16; and a daughter, Ellie May, 18. The only reason Ellie May hasn’t been married is because she has a gruesome harelip that makes her gums look like “a bleeding, painful wound.” The family is slowly starving to death. None of these characters would be caught dead in a novel by John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, or Eudora Welty. The Lesters are poor, but they have no dignity. They behave like wild animals.

They steal from each other, beat each other, try to have sex with each other. They are violent, terminally stupid, and slothful to a pathological degree. Jeeter is so lazy that when he trips, he stays on the ground for an hour before bothering to get back up. The wanton crudeness of the Lesters frustrated Caldwell’s critics. Was the novel a cry for social justice, or a nasty satire? Yes, conditions were bad in the rural South—but could they really be this bad? Caldwell, who was severe and defensive in interviews, claimed that he had aimed for both comedy and tragedy: They’re almost interchangeable, because there is comedy in tragedy and tragedy in comedy. There’s very little distinction between the two; you can’t have one without the other ... You’ve got to be true to your material, and life itself is a series of both. They go right together. An unimpeachable statement, but disingenuous. Fiction, after all, is not life; the same rules do not apply. Only once in Tobacco Road does Caldwell effectively balance comedy and tragedy, and that is in the opening scene, before the reader is able to grasp the full extent of the novel’s absurdity.

The neighbor Lov Bensey, returning from town with a bag of turnips, stops at the Lester property. Lov has a complaint: Pearl, his 12-year-old bride, refuses to sleep with him. He has tried kicking her, pouring water on her, and throwing rocks and sticks at her, but nothing has worked. The only thing left is to tie her to the bed with plow line, but he wants her father to help him do it. But as he is complaining to Jeeter, Lov is distracted by the sight of Ellie May, who is crawling to him half naked across the sandy yard. Soon Lov begins “horsing” with the deformed girl. Seizing the opportunity, Jeeter leaps on the turnips and carries them off into the woods while Ada beats her son-in-law with a stick to prevent him from chasing after. ‘Tobacco Road’ by Erskine Caldwell. 192 p. University of Georgia Press. $12.69 In this case, at least, the Lesters are motivated by hunger. But greater indignities follow. Dude marries a sexually voracious woman more than twice his age in order to drive her new automobile.

When the couple goes into the bedroom to consummate their union, the rest of the Lesters poke their heads through the doorway or drag a ladder up to the window and watch. Jeeter tries to sleep with his daughter-in-law and, it is implied, his daughters. Dude runs a black man off the road, killing him, and only regrets the damage done to the car. Then he runs over his grandmother. Tobacco Road is grim, but never tragic. Caldwell’s characters lack the dignity of tragic figures—they are too cruel and hateful. The reversals they suffer are not surprising; there is never any doubt that they will end in ruin, in large part because they begin in ruin and show no real desire to escape their fate. For the same reason the novel does not succeed as a comedy. It is funny, but in the way that a tasteless joke is funny: you shouldn’t be laughing, you don’t want to laugh, but you laugh until you’re sick. And when the laughter stops, you wonder whether you’re not so different from a wild animal either. Other notable novels published in 1932: Young Lonigan by James T.

Farrell Light in August by William Faulkner The Fountain by Charles Morgan Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall Mary’s Neck by Booth Tarkington Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder Pulitzer Prize: University of Virginia Library Online Exhibits | In the Brilliancy of the Footlights: Creating America's Theatre Opening page, typed, of "Tobacco Road," by Erskine Caldwell, signed. No date. From Page to Stage II Tobacco Road In 1932, Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell wrote the provocative novel Tobacco Road, which depicted the underbelly of the 1930s rural South-the poverty and the physical and emotional starvation. Adapted for the stage by Jack Kirkland the following year, Tobacco Road ran for 3,182 performances for over seven years, making it the longest-running Broadway drama up to that time. Controversy surrounded the play; critics assailed it as immoral and repulsive, but the public was titillated by the plot and language. In a note in the published version of the play, Caldwell wrote: In the course of Tobacco Road's slow progress it opened on a windy December night in New York.

Those men of America who constitute the critical gentry published the following day in columns deep their indignation. The people on the stage behaved like animals; the play was inept, clumsy, and rudderless; there was too much dust on the stage; the play was too snickery to watch; there was no Southern dialect spoken; it was ruttish and blabby...Jack Kirkland has dramatized Tobacco Road in the manner in which, were I myself a playwright, I should have liked to do it. He has followed the novel from beginning to end just as it was written. I like his work so well that I have just about made up my mind to suggest that I trade him my novel for his play. This photograph was taken on the night that Mayor Kelly closed the play. Kirkland, Jack. Tobacco Road, A Three Act Play by Jack Kirkland, from the Novel by Erskine Caldwell. New York: Viking, 1934. Typed letter, signed, from Theodore Dreiser to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. 1 February 1934. Life mask of John Steinbeck, cast by Ritch Lovejoy. 1934.

Of Mice and Men American novelist John Steinbeck wrote three plays during his literary career. Two of the plays dramatized his previously written novels, and all three plays were written in, what Steinbeck termed, the "play-novelette" format. In describing this form, Steinbeck said, It is a play that is easy to read or a short novel that can be played simply by lifting out the dialogue. It gives a play a wide chance of being read and a piece of fiction a chance of being played without the usual revision. I think it is a legitimate form and one that can stand a great deal of exploration. As Steinbeck's first playwriting attempt, he adapted his novel Of Mice and Men. Produced by George S. Kaufman, the play opened November 23, 1937, at the Music Box Theatre in New York, running for 207 performances. This drama won Steinbeck the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the 1937-1938 season. Autograph postcard, signed, from John Steinbeck to Wilbur Needham. [26 May 1936].

Steinbeck writes to the critic, regarding the adaptation Of Mice and Men, I'm going into training to write for the theatre which seems to be waking up. I have some ideas for new dramatic form which I'm experimenting with. Of course I don't know yet whether I am capable of writing for the theatre. Just have to learn. Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937. Copy is inscribed "For George and Beatrice Kaufman: I wish I could have written as good a play as you directed. John Steinbeck." All items displayed in this section from the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Tobacco Road by Caldwell, Erskine Tobacco Road (Signed By CAST of Tabacco Road) and Author Caldwell, Erskine Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. First Edition with Scribner's Seal and Scribner's A on copyright page. Burnt orangy/brown boards with gold gilt on upper boards and spine. Author's inscription is tipped in and the cast of Tobacco Road has inscribed and signed also.

In researching this I understand that the Marion Wilson Waldrip (whom this book is inscribed to) was a frequent attendee of this play and always was invited back stage to talk with the cast members. He was said to have seen this play so many times that he had rubbed an indentation with his cane in the wood floor where he was sitting. Some of the cast members that inscribed and signed this book were: Howard Banks, who played Capt. Tim. Dick Lee, (Henry Peabody) ; Henry Hull, Leon Ames, Ada Sester, Priscilla Knowles and others. Of course Erskin Caldwell also has signed a tipped in paper to: Marion Wilson Waldrip. This is a lovely copy in very nice condition. I am always happy to send detailed photographs to serious buyers. . Signed by Author. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. TOBACCO ROAD CALDWELL ERSKINE London: Cresset, 1933. First Edition. Hard Cover. Dust Jacket. First UK Edition. Publishers brown cloth over boards with white and brown lettering on the front.

A near fine copy in the VERY RARE D/W priced 3s 6d NET to the inside flap as called for. The D/W is also in near fine condition with just a hint of spine fade. The First UK Edition is genuinely rare in D/W and even more so in nice condition as the white enamel to the front board chips easily. This is a remarkable survival. The story of the disintegration of a Georgia family during the Great Depression, and the basis for the Broadway play and for the 1941 film directed by John Ford starring Charley Grapewin as Jeeter. Rare in the UK First Edition. Tobacco Road Erskine Caldwell New York: Scribner's and Sons, 1932. Copyright date 1932, first edition, first printing Scribner's (A) Present on the copyright page. Red cloth over boards with red lettering and design on a gold background on the front and on the spine, blind stamped decorative front board. Green inside covers front and back, light tent to the top page edges, for edge pages are not cut. No tears, bent pages, nor any writing. No Dust Jacket.

Shelf wear to the edges and to the head and told the spine are moderate with bumps to the head and told the spine light creasing to the head of the spine light soiling to the back of the board. Text is bright and clean, binding is secure, a solid collectible book, one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/no dust Jacket. 7¾" - 9¾" Tall. Collectible. Tobacco Road Caldwell, Erskine New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. Book. Near Fine -. Hardcover. First Edition. First edition, first printing, with Scribner "A" and seal on the copyright page and title page dated 1932. Reddish-orange hardcover with gilt title block on front cover and spine. Light-blue endpapers. 241 pages. Untrimmed page edges. NEAR FINE - hardcover book without dust jacket. Bright and clean with only slight wear to the edges and slight creasing at spine ends. A few faint finger smudges to the boards. Very minor touch of bumping to the fore edge of front board. Sharp corners.

Very slight touch of sunning and slight waviness to the cloth of the spine with no wear to the gilt. Gilt on front cover is very bright and unworn. Book is straight, square and tightly bound with strong, sound hinges. Previous owner's ex libris bookplate on front endpaper and minor signs of a previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Brown shadow to half-title page from previous insert. Otherwise flawless interior with bright clean pages appearing unread.. Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell - Google Books Erskine Caldwell 1 Review Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them. Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre | New Georgia Encyclopedia Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre Original entry by Edwin T.

Arnold , Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, 07/16/2002 Last edited by NGE Staff on 05/16/2016 Explore This Article The Film Although Erskine Caldwell wrote more than sixty books, twenty-five novels among them, he is best known for two works of long fiction, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). Tobacco Road was named one of the Modern Library's 100 best novels of the twentieth century, and God's Little Acre remains Caldwell's single most popular work, having sold more than 10 million copies. Along with the less well-known Journeyman (1935), these books make up a serio-comic trilogy of Georgia life in the first half of the twentieth century. They detail the ruination of the land, the growth of textile mills , and the abiding influence of fundamentalist religion in the South. These books thus present a radical contrast to the traditionally genteel and romantic views of the region, popularized most notably by Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind (1936).

Tobacco Road The Novel Tobacco Road, published by Charles Scribner and Sons in 1932, was Caldwell's third novel. It was inspired by the terrible poverty he witnessed as a young man growing up in the small east Georgia town of Wrens. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, who was pastor of the local Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, was also an amateur sociologist and often took his son with him to observe some of the more destitute members of the rural community. Erskine Caldwell's sympathy for these people and his outrage at the conditions in which they lived were real, and his novel was meant to be a work of social protest. But he also refused to sentimentalize their poverty or to cast his characters as inherently noble in their sufferings, as so many other protest works did. The novel's Lester family, headed by the shiftless patriarch Jeeter, both appall and intrigue readers with their gross sexuality, casual violence, selfishness, and overall lack of decency. Living as squatters on barren land that had once belonged to their more prosperous ancestors, the Lesters have come to represent in the American public's mind the degradation inherent in extreme poverty.

That Caldwell also portrays them as often-comic figures further complicates the reader's response. Tobacco Road is a call to action, but it offers no easy answers and thus has generated intense debate both in and out of the South. Many southerners denounced the novel as exaggerated and needlessly cruel and even pornographic, an affront to the gentility of the region. Northern critics, however, tended to read the book as a serious indictment of a failed economic system in need of correction. Caldwell later explained that the book was not meant to represent the entire South, but for many this work confirmed demeaning southern stereotypes. The Play and Film The stage version of Tobacco Road was written by Jack Kirkland and opened on December 4, 1933, at the Masque Theatre in New York City. Caldwell had little to do with the play version and initially felt it would fail. First reviews were mixed, and after a month of sporadic attendance, the play moved to the 48th Street Theater, where it slowly became a word-of-mouth success. With Henry Hull as the first of five actors who would play Jeeter Lester, Tobacco Road ran for more than seven years, through 3,182 performances.

When it closed on May 31, 1941, it had become the longest-running play in the history of the Broadway stage up to that time. Road shows took the play to cities throughout the nation and later into foreign countries. In 1934 Chicago mayor Edward F. Kelly declared the play obscene and closed it down. The producers sued, and in a major court case, the play was allowed to continue. This was the first of numerous attempts to censor the show, which was often taken to court or banned during its many runs. Caldwell tirelessly defended the play and the book and, in the process, became a leading advocate for artistic freedom and First Amendment rights. In 1940 Darryl F. Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox, which had just produced John Ford's classic film version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, bought the screen rights to Tobacco Road. Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (a Georgia native) attempted to preserve the caustic comedy and social protest of the book and play, but the studio overruled them on central issues, specifically the tragic ending. The result was a sentimental burlesque that Caldwell himself disavowed.

Starring Charley Grapewin, repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester, the film was released in 1941. It enjoyed initial success but is now considered one of Ford's lesser movies, a poor relative of his great work in The Grapes of Wrath. God's Little Acre The Novel God's Little Acre was published by Viking Press in 1933, one year after the publication of Tobacco Road. In it, Caldwell shifts his sights to the industrialized South. Influenced in part by the textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, he considered this work to be a "proletarian" novel dealing with the plight of workers deprived of union protection. It was intended to support these mill hands, or "lintheads," as they were sometimes called. Will Thompson, who leads the strike, represents both the inherent power and the frustration of the working class. When Thompson is killed by guards as he attempts to reopen the mill shut down by its ruthless owners, his death becomes a rallying cry; and his corpse is borne through the streets, but the mills remain closed. The book also examines the misuse of the land and other natural resources.

Ty Ty Walden, who (unlike Jeeter Lester) still owns his farm, spends his time digging for gold instead of farming the rich soil . His delusion and the tragedy it brings to his family again illustrate the waste Caldwell saw in southern attitudes toward the land. Like Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre contains scenes of explicit sexuality. In April 1933 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took Caldwell and Viking Press to court for dissemination of pornography. More than sixty authors, editors, and literary critics rallied in support of the book, and Judge Benjamin Greenspan of the New York Magistrates Court ruled in its favor. The court case is still considered a major decision in the establishment of artists' First Amendment rights in freedom of expression. The book became a worldwide best-seller and remains today one of the most popular novels ever published. The Film In 1958 director Anthony Mann and screenwriter Phillip Yordan, in collaboration with Caldwell, made the film version of God's Little Acre, starring Robert Ryan as Ty Ty Walden and Aldo Ray as Will Thompson. The film, like the book, was considered scandalous and became one of the top-grossing movies for that year.

Truer to its source than John Ford's Tobacco Road had been, God's Little Acre remains the best representation of Caldwell on film. Loading

Question: Who wrote the 1932 novel ‘Tobacco Road’?
Answer: Erskine Caldwell