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 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: 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. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell, Signed - AbeBooks Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell, Signed You Searched For: Results (1 - 11) of 11 Sort By Published by Signet Book, Boston, Massachusetts Used Softcover Signed Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Signet Book, Boston, Massachusetts. Softcover. Book Condition: Good. A later printing paperback of the 1932 classic about Georgia sharecroppers, signed by the author on the title page. Half-inch tear on front cover with light edge wear, spine uncreased.

Last copyright date of 1959 noted. ; B&W Illustrations; 7" x 4 1/4"; 159 pp; Signed by Author. Bookseller Inventory # 011433 ISBN 10: 0451515099 ISBN 13: 9780451515094 Used Paperback Signed Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Signet/The New American Library, Inc., New York. Paperback. Book Condition: Near Fine. No Jacket. Fredenthal, David (illustrator). 53rd?. 159pp.+advert; SC pinks&blk.(b/w spine)-pic.cover(woman lying down&covering breasts); PONinscrip.,inside ft.cover, otherwise very slight rub w/clean,tight pgs. illus. Actual pub.date not known, has isbn# on spine. Signed by Caldwell on title pg. Caldwell made personal appearance & signed books brought to him. Includes Fact Sheet of event & sheet w/short bio.&biblio. also signed by Caldwell.

Book ID: "A Signet Modern Classic - 451-CJ1509" Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. Signed by Author. Novel. Bookseller Inventory # 022688 Published by Grosset & Dunlap (1932) Used Hardcover Signed Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. NO JACKET. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on first page. Good/No Dustjacket. Mustard cloth. 1" -long narrow crescent piece missing from bottom edge of front board. A few smudges and spots. Previous owner's name inside, lightly age-toned pages. DJ flap and portion of front DJ panel have been cut out and are laid in. "100100" notation on flap indicate early edition of this reprint. Signed. Bookseller Inventory # 1510070001 Published by Grossett & Dunlap (1932) Used Hardcover Signed Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Grossett & Dunlap, 1932. Hardcover.

Book Condition: Collectible: Very Good. Reprint. Signed and inscribed by the author to a previous owner. In Very Good condition. Clean text, though pages toned, with light occasional age-related spotting, and a few reading creases. Cloth shows faint rubbing, bumped corners, rubbing at corners and spine ends. The spine is slightly darkened, shows a light internal reading crease, and a stray red pen mark at the base. A lovely copy. Signed. Signed. Bookseller Inventory # 140902033 Used Hardcover First Edition Signed Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: VIKING, 1934. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. FIRST. A VERY GOOD FIRST IN DJ. INSCRIBED BY ERSKINE CALDWELL AND SIGNED BY JACK KIRKLAND.SIGNED to Samuel Marx., film producer, screenwriter and book author. Signed by Author(s). Book. Bookseller Inventory # fic 3/22-09 Published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce., NY.

(1940) Used Hardcover First Edition Signed Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Duell, Sloan and Pearce., NY., 1940. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. David Fredenthal. (illustrator). 1st Edition. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. With Illustrations by David Fredenthal. NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. (1940). 1st Illustrated Edition, the Decennial Edition. 8vo, [4], 1-281 pp. Gray woven cloth lined and lettered in red. Illustrated priced dust jacket. Art Deco bookplate inside cover. Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket with two pieces of tape on verso. Signed and dated Jan 10, 1942, Darien, Conn. In this edition, Caldwell provides a two-page reflection on the beginnings and ten-year history of his most famous novel. He lived in Darien, CT. Signed by Author(s).

Bookseller Inventory # 001932 Published by Scribners / Scribner's (1932) Used First Edition Signed Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Scribners / Scribner's, 1932. First Edition. TOBACCO ROAD, Scribners, 1932, first edition, spine somewhat tanned and dulled, else a tight vg copy in a just about vg pictorial dust-wrapper with some modest chipping to the dust-wrapper spine extremities and a faint but just noticeable stain on the front dust-wrapper panel. This copy INSCRIBED to Malcolm Cowley and his wife Muriel as a "funny wedding present" by author and translator Hanna Josephson. Indeed, Cowley & Josephson collaborated as editors and translators on a work entitled Aragon: Poet of The French Resistance which was published by Duell, Sloane and Pearce in 1945.

Bookseller Inventory # 11390 ISBN 10: 0883220237 ISBN 13: 9780883220238 Used Hardcover First Edition Signed Quantity Available: 1 Published by Charles Scribner's Sons (1932) Used Hardcover First Edition Signed Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. Hard Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. First Edition. 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. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Signed by Author. Bookseller Inventory # 001312 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1932. Couverture rigide. Book Condition: Très bon. Dust Jacket Condition: Très bon. Edition originale...

First edition, first printing, of this novel, the story of the desintegration of a Georgia family during the Great Depression, basis for the Broadway play and for the 1941 film directed by John Ford starring Charley Grapewin as Jeeter, octavo, 241 pages, briefly inscribed and signed by the author on the half-title page "To Rick Harwell / Erskine Caldwell", Richard B. Harwell was a nationally recognized librarian, bibliographer and historian, founder of The Richard B. Harwell Book Award "for the best book on a Civil War subject published in the preceding year", with his bookplate on the front pastedown page, fine copy in close to fine dust jacket, with a 1cm closed tear at top of front panel, in a matching custom-made clamshell card box. Dédicacé par l'auteur. Bookseller Inventory # 22088 Tobacco Road (1941) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.

Error Hillbilly family life in 1941 rural Georgia. Director: Erskine Caldwell (based on the novel by), Jack Kirkland (stage play) | 1 more credit » Stars: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 43 titles created 10 Mar 2013 a list of 36 titles created 29 Nov 2013 a list of 23 titles created 23 Jun 2015 a list of 37 titles created 23 Oct 2015 a list of 33 titles created 7 months ago Search for " Tobacco Road " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Aboard the freighter Glencairn, the lives of the crew are lived out in fear, loneliness, suspicion and cameraderie. The men smuggle drink and women aboard, fight with each other, spy on ...

See full summary » Director: John Ford A Louisiana con man enters his steamboat into a winner-take-all race with a rival while trying to find a witness to free his nephew, about to be hung for murder. Director: John Ford John Ford weaves three "Judge Priest" stories together to form a good- natured exploration of honour and small-town politics in the South around the turn of the century. Judge William ... See full summary » Director: John Ford A dozen British soldiers, lost in a Mesopotamian desert during world war I, are menaced by unseen Arab enemies. Director: John Ford A fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case. Director: John Ford Anti-Catholic and anti-cleric policies in the Mexican state of Tabasco lead the revolutionary government to persecute the state's last remaining priest. Directors: John Ford, Emilio Fernández Stars: Henry Fonda, Dolores del Rio, Pedro Armendáriz Judge Priest, a proud Confederate veteran, uses common sense and considerable humanity to dispense justice in a small town in the Post-Bellum Kentucky.

Director: John Ford A veteran American flyer trains new recruits, including the acrophobic son of his dead war buddy. Complications arise when the younger man falls in love with his mentor's girl. Director: William A. Wellman After witnessing the murder of his father by a renegade as a boy, the grown-up Brandon helps to realize his father's dream of a transcontinental railway. Director: John Ford Two young drifters guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter cutthroats, Indians, geography, and moral challenges on the journey. Director: John Ford A biography of Navy flier-turned-screenwriter Frank W. "Spig" Wead. Director: John Ford The recently widowed Mary Stuart returns to Scotland to reclaim her throne but is opposed by her half-brother and her own Scottish lords. Directors: John Ford, Leslie Goodwins Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge Edit Storyline Shiftless Jeeter Lester and his family of hillbilly stereotypes live in a rural backwater where their ancestors were once wealthy planters.

Their slapstick existence is threatened by a bank's plans to take over the land for more profitable farming; subplots involve the affairs and marriages of son Dude and daughter Ellie May. Written by Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu> See All (28) » Taglines: ON THE SCREEN AT LAST! The Picture you've waited eight years to see...Picturized by the men who gave you "GRAPES OF WRATH" See more » Genres: 7 March 1941 (USA) See more » Also Known As: El camino del tabaco See more » Filming Locations: Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording) Color: Did You Know? Trivia The movie was banned in Australia for unspecified reasons, but generally had few censorship problems. See more » Goofs The morning following a torrential rain storm, dirt roads are absolutely dry. See more » Quotes Jeeter Lester : Why, Ada here never... never spoke a word to me for the first ten years we were married. Heh! Them were the happiest ten years of my life.

Referenced in Grindhouse (2007) See more » Soundtracks Sung a cappella by Marjorie Rambeau , William Tracy , Charles Halton and others at the marriage bureau Played as background music often (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) – See all my reviews In Georgia, near to the Savannah River, the lazy and crook hillbilly Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin) lives in the Tobacco Road with his wife Ada (Elizabeth Patterson), his son Dude (William Tracy) and his single daughter Ellie May (Gene Tierney) in a very poor condition. When the bank decides to take over his land, the banker George Payne (Grant Mitchell) is convinced by his friend Capt. Tim Harmon (Dana Andrews) to lease the land to Jeeter for US$ 100.00 per year. Jeeter plots a means to loan the amount from the widow Sister Bessie Rice (Marjorie Rambeau) that has just received U$ 800.00 from the life insurance company. However, Bessie decides to get married with Dude and uses the money to buy a brand new car for Dude.

Jeeter plots a means to sell her car while he tries to marry Ellie May with his son-in-law Lov Bensey (Ward Bond) that was left by his wife. "Tobacco Road" is absolutely overrated with a boring story that is not funny and annoying characters. Dude honking the horn of the car is irritating; Jeeter is a small time crook and thief that steals his own family and it is impossible to feel any empathy or sympathy for such hillbilly. My vote is four. Title (Brazil): "Caminhos Ásperos" ("Rough Ways") 18 of 31 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The New York Times: Book Review Search Article December 1, 1982, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition Section C; Page 25, Column 1; Cultural Desk Byline: By EDWIN MCDOWELL Lead: FIFTY years ago they emerged from the backwoods of Georgia, shiftless and uneducated poor whites bearing such unfamiliar names as Jeeter, Ellie May, Sister Bessie, Ty Ty and Darling Jill.

Underfed and oversexed, their public passions, petty jealousies and frequent fits of anger stunned an American public that had barely been aware of their existence. Today, long after the conditions that spawned them have largely disappeared, their names remain etched in the American consciousness. For they are characters from ''Tobacco Road'' and ''God's Little Acre,'' Erskine Caldwell's novels of deprivation and depravity in the Deep South. Praised for calling attention to deplorable conditions in the rural South and damned for having exaggerated those conditions, the books were widely commented upon but rarely ignored. Together they have sold more than 17 million copies, making them two of the biggest sellers of all time. Moreover, an adaptation of ''Tobacco Road'' ran for a record seven-and-a-half consecutive years on Broadway, and the movie version still turns up on television. Text: But the books' appeal stemmed as much from shock as from sociology. Few books of the Depression, other than those that came in plain brown wrappers, contained the earthy language or explicit sex offered up by Mr. Caldwell, a native of Wrens, Ga., and the son of a Presbyterian minister.

Many Protests Registered The author was denounced from pulpits, a number of cities banned the books, and libraries removed them from their shelves. To this day, Mr. Caldwell professes surprise at the reaction. ''I was not trying to prove anything,'' he said in a recent interview. ''I was writing about the people I knew. I lived in the same neighborhood as the Tobacco Road fraternity and I went to school in the area. I knew very little about life outside the South. I was only trying to tell a story.'' With more than 50 books of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, Mr. Caldwell, who will be 79 years old on Dec. 17, has told many stories. ''More than 100 million copies of his books have been printed around the world, and his short stories continue to be included in anthologies,'' said Patricia S. Myrer, his literary agent. But those first two books, ''Tobacco Road'' published in 1932 and ''God's Little Acre'' in 1933, are the ones that established his reputation. Ranking as Southern Writer In the 1930's Mr.

Caldwell was hailed as America's premiere proletarian novelist. And a few years ago an admiring Calder Willingham, another Southern novelist, said, ''A good case can be made that the inventor of 'Tobacco Road' - far more than William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, or any other Southern writer one can think of - is the true mythmaker of post-bellum Southern literature.'' Mr. Caldwell himself professes unconcern about his ultimate literary standing. ''Maybe my two novels will stand up as artifacts for people who are interested in what it was like during the Great Depression,'' he said. ''It's hard for people today to think of life without Social Security and food stamps, but they didn't exist at the time I wrote those books.'' ''Tobacco Road'' was Mr. Caldwell's third novel but his first financial success. Until then, after leaving his $25-a-week job as a reporter on The Atlanta Journal in 1926, he spent seven lean years on a Maine farm trying to make it as a fulltime writer.

Success as Book Reviewer ''I was sort of a caretaker, so I didn't have to pay rent,'' he recalled. ''I raised potatoes so I always had something to eat and I cut wood to keep warm. I had the good fortune to persuade a woman on The Charlotte Observer to let me review books. It didn't pay anything, but when I finished the reviews I'd sell the books for 25 cents to second-hand bookstores.'' In his autobiography, ''Call It Experience,'' Mr. Caldwell recounts how he sent one story a day for a week to Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner's book editor who doubled as editor of Scribner's Magazine. Mr. Perkins rejected them all (although most were subsequently published without payment in the smaller literary magazines). So Mr. Caldwell sent Mr. Perkins two stories a week. The editor finally accepted two of them to run in the same issue of the magazine. When Mr. Perkins said he would pay ''two-fifty'' for both of them, Mr. Caldwell replied: 'Two-fifty? I don't know. I thought maybe I'd receive a little more than that.'' So Mr. Perkins upped the payment to three-fifty.

''I guess that'll be all right,'' Mr. Caldwell replied. ''I'd thought I'd get a little more than three dollars and a half, though, for both of them.'' Big Difference in Figures Said a mystified Maxwell Perkins: ''Three dollars and fifty cents? Oh, no! I must have given you the wrong impression, Caldwell. Not three dollars and a half. No, I meant $350.'' The astonished author replied that $350 would be just fine, and not long afterward he sold ''Tobacco Road'' to Mr. Perkins. Soon after that, Mr. Caldwell moved to Easy Street: At one point during the Broadway run, he wrote in his autobiography, he was earning about $2,000 a week in royalties from the play and about $1,000 a month in royalties from the book. He also earned a lot of money from Darryl Zanuck's movie version of ''Tobacco Road,'' but he would just as soon forget that; he describes the result as ''one of the most conspicuous failures in cinematic history'' because of its falsified happy ending.

Jack Kirkland wrote the stage version of ''Tobacco Road'' and it made theatrical history when it opened in 1933. Advantage of Obscenity ''The immediate success of 'Tobacco Road' probably derived from the scandal value of its foul language and its reputation for obscenity -both in short supply in 1933,'' wrote Brooks Atkinson in his book ''Broadway.'' But Mr. Atkinson added that the work was ''a genuine folk play that substituted brutal truth for the bucolic charm of the genre.'' Mr. Caldwell's writing career has been more versatile than most. He wrote Hollywood scripts for about five years. In 1941 he reported from Russia for Life magazine, CBS radio and the newspaper PM. He wrote articles from Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the North American Newspaper Alliance. And his books consist of two dozen novels, 10 short story collections, an autobiography and a dozen works of nonfiction ranging from ''Tenant Farmers'' (1935) to ''In Search of Bisco,'' (1965), an evocative account of a visit to the scenes of his childhood.

He also collaborated with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, the second of his four wives, on text-picture books about prewar Czechoslovakia, wartime Russia and the American South. Sales Called 'Extraordinary' ''His sales have been simply extraordinary, even for books you don't think of in connection with Erskine Caldwell,'' said William R. Grose, editor in chief of New American Library. The library has printed in paperback more than 48 million copies of various Caldwell titles. ''God's Little Acre'' alone has sold 8.2 million copies in 65 printings while ''Tobacco Road'' has sold some 3.8 million copies in 46 printings. Meanwhile, the library has just reissued special 50th anniversary editions of both books. Mr. Caldwell and Virginia, his wife of 25 years, have lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., for the last five years. The Governor of Arizona, Bruce Babbitt, had proclaimed November ''Erskine Caldwell Month,'' and the Phoenix Little Theater recently revived ''Tobacco Road.'' Mr.

Caldwell said that to the best of his knowledge there has not been a week in last 49 years that the play had not been performed somewhere in the world Working on Travel Diary Mr. Caldwell is now writing a travel diary. He has traveled extensively most of his life, even revisiting his native state. ''There's been great economic and social change in Georgia, as elsewhere in the South,'' he said. ''With all the Federal and state money, there is not the dire poverty that I saw. The remnants of Tobacco Road are still there, back in the ravines and hollows of the mountains, but the sharecropper existence has disappeared and people can apply for food stamps.'' Asked whether his books had helped accelerate that change, Mr. Caldwell thought for a moment and replied, ''It's been said that they allowed people to see with their own eyes what they couldn't see from calculated ignorance or blindness. But remember, I didn't try to change or reform the world; I only wanted to report on it.''

Question: Who wrote the book 'Tobacco Road'?
Answer: Erskine Caldwell