Erskine Preston Caldwell

1.  Erskine Preston Caldwell

Erskine Preston Caldwell

2.

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small town
of White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only
child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister
Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his wife Caroline Preston (née
Bell) Caldwell, a schoolteacher. Rev. Caldwell's ministry
required moving the family often, to places including
Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North
Carolina. When he was 15 years old, his family settled in
Wrens, Georgia.[4] His mother Caroline was from Virginia.
Her ancestry included English nobility which held large land
grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English ancestors and
Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira
Caldwell's ancestors were Scots-Irish and had also been in
America since before the revolution and had fought in it.
Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine
College, a Presbyterian school in nearby South Carolina. His
political sympathies were with the working classes, and he
used his experiences with farmers and common workers to
write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life
he presented public seminars on the typical conditions of
tenant-sharecroppers in the South.[4]

3.

After he returned from World War II,
Caldwell took up residence in
Connecticut, then in Arizona with
third wife, June, then in San
Francisco. During the last twenty
years of his life, his routine was to
travel the world for six months of
each year, taking with him notebooks
in which to jot down his ideas. Many
of these notebooks were not
published, but can be examined in a
museum dedicated to him in the
town square of Moreland, Georgia,
where the home in which he was
born was relocated and dedicated to
his memory.
Caldwell died from complications of
emphysema and lung cancer on April
11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
He is buried in Scenic Hills Memorial
Park, Ashland, Oregon. Although he
never lived there, his stepson and
fourth wife, Virginia Caldwell
Hibbs,[9][10] did, and wished him to be
buried near his family.[11] Virginia
died in December 2017 aged 98.

4.

• Georgia Boy was a
special book to
Caldwell, and its
humor is less in the
service of social
criticism than in other
works in which he
dealt with poor white
southerners.

5.

Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles
outsidTobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles
outside Augusta during the worst years of the Great
Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant
farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern
cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization
of production and the migration into cities. The main
character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and
sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and
his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil. e Augusta
during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts
a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as
some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made
redundant by the industrialization of production and the
migration into cities. The main character of the novel is
Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is
redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the
fertility and promise of the soil.

6.

• The stories are of different
characters, some obviously
intended as humorous or
satirical while others are
lyrical, romantic and/or tragic.
Most of them are laid against
the background of the lives of
ordinary people in the
contemporary US South, the
social milieu most familiar to
the author - some being
specifically located in his home
state of Georgia.

7.

• God's Little Acre is a 1933 novel by Erskine
Caldwell about a dysfunctional farming family
in Georgia obsessed with sex and wealth. The
novel's sexual themes were so controversial
that the New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice asked a New York state court to censor
it. Although controversial, the novel became
an international best seller with over 10
million copies sold,[1] and was published as an
Armed Services Edition during WWII. God's
Little Acre is Caldwell's most popular novel,
although his reputation is often tied to his
1932 novel Tobacco Road, which was listed in
the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.[1] God's
Little Acre was later adapted as a 1958 film
starring Robert Ryan.

8.

• You Have Seen Their Faces is a book by
photographer Margaret Bourke-White
and novelist Erskine Caldwell. It was
first published in 1937 by Viking Press,
with a paperback version by Modern
Age Books following quickly. BourkeWhite and Caldwell married in 1939.[1]

9.

• Place Called Estherville is a novel written
by Erskine Caldwell, most famous for his
novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.
The book was first published in 1949 by
Duell, Sloan & Pearce[1] and later published
in paperback by Signet Books. It would go
on to sell more than 1.5 million copies.
The novel centers on a biracial brother and
sister, Ganus and Kathyanne Bazemore.
After their mother dies, they move to a
segregated town called Estherville to help
take care of their sick aunt. They face
abuse from the town that culminates in
tragedy.

10.

• Kneel to the Rising Sun is a
collection of short stories by
Erskine Caldwell first published in
1935. The seventeen stories, only
a few pages each, all deal with
various tragedies occurring in the
early twentieth century American
South, chiefly caused by poverty
or racism. Caldwell is most well
known for his novels, such as
Tobacco Road; however, Kneel to
the Rising Sun is held in high
acclaim by his critics.

11.

• Erskine Caldwell likes to
plunge "into the thick of
people", from where he draws
in abundance the strikingly
cruel stories, then funny and
funny stories of anecdotal or
fairy-tale character, then
dramatic and tragic, revealing
the full weight of the sad fate
of a humiliated person. As a
realist artist who wants, in his
own words, "to get into the
soul of people living nearby,"
he notices the social contrasts
of American life and their
influence on the fate of the
individual.

12.

• From the very beginning of his
creative career, he resisted the
temptation to cram lively and
dramatic content into a stenciled
Novella with a happy ending. Op
became one of its subverters,
the destroyer of its canons,
supported by some critics, but
especially willingly by publishers.
It is no accident that the writer
was accused of a predilection for
depicting the dark, ugly sides of
American life, and of deliberately
"exploiting" the theme of poor
and destitute people. He could
not pass by the social evils of
American reality with
indifference.

13.

In emphasizing the importance of a writer's
interest in sociological questions, Caldwell
usually made the following reservation: don't
let them take him for a preacher. He doesn't
want to be accused of being biased. In his
works, the reader will find everything that is
in life, because his creations speak for
themselves. Hence-some features of the
narrator's manner. About the cruel, rude and
savage in American life, especially
characteristic of the American South ("payday
on the Savannah river"), about the stupidity
and injustice of the obdurate proprietor ("the
Abe Latham Case", "the Negro in the well"),
the writer sometimes tells with such external
calm and chilling equanimity that it may give
the impression that the artist is indifferent to
the person. Caldwell categorically denies this:
"I love ordinary people. I'm one of them. I
hate those who look down on ordinary
people,"he said in an interview with the
Literary newspaper.

14. Wife of Erskine Caldwell

15.

Margaret Bourke-White ; June
14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was
an American photographer and
documentary photographer.[1]
She is best known as the first
foreign photographer permitted
to take pictures of Soviet
industry under the Soviet's fiveyear plan,[2] the first American
female war photojournalist, and
having one of her photographs
(the construction of Fort Peck
Dam) on the cover of the first
issue of Life magazine.[3] She
died of Parkinson's disease about
eighteen years after developing
symptoms

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