Erskine Caldwell Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Bast*ard (1929)
  2. Poor Fool (1930)
  3. Tobacco Road (1932)
  4. God’s Little Acre (1933)
  5. Journeyman (1935)
  6. Sacriledge of Alan Kent (1936)
  7. This Very Earth (1940)
  8. Trouble in July (1940)
  9. Georgia Boy (1943)
  10. Tragic Ground (1944)
  11. A House in the Uplands (1946)
  12. The Sure Hand of God (1947)
  13. A Place Called Estherville (1949)
  14. Episode in Palmetto (1950)
  15. A Lamp for Nightfall (1952)
  16. Love and Money (1954)
  17. Gretta (1955)
  18. Claudelle (1958)
  19. Molly Cottontail (1958)
  20. Jenny By Nature (1961)
  21. Close to Home (1962)
  22. The Last Night of Summer (1963)
  23. Miss Mamma Aimee (1967)
  24. Summertime Island (1968)
  25. The Weather Shelter (1969)
  26. Earnshaw Neighbourhood (1972)
  27. Annette (1974)

Omnibus

Collections

  1. American Earth (1931)
  2. We Are the Living (1933)
  3. Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935)
  4. Humorous Side of Erskine Caldwell (1951)
  5. The Courting of Susie Brown (1952)
  6. Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1953)
  7. Certain Women (1957)
  8. Men and Women (1962)
  9. Stories of Life, North and South (1984)
  10. The Black and White Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1984)
  11. Midsummer Passion (1990)
  12. The Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1995)

Picture Books

  1. You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
  2. North of the Danube (1939)
  3. Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1941)

Non fiction

  1. Call It Experience (1951)
  2. In Search of Bisco (1965)
  3. Deep South (1967)
  4. Afternoons in Mid-America (1976)
  5. With All My Might (1987)
  6. Selected Letters: 1929-55 (1999)

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Erskine Caldwell Books Overview

Tobacco Road

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.

God’s Little Acre

Like Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens’ obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty’s son in law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike. First published in 1933, God’s Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all time best seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.

Journeyman

Written immediately following Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, this novel introduces one of Erskine Caldwell’s most memorable characters: the philandering, murderous itinerant preacher, Semon Dye. Part allegory, part tall tale, and with a good measure of old frontier humor, Journeyman,/i tells of a stranger, as devilish as he is divine, who mysteriously arrives in Rocky Comfort, Georgia, and, inside of a week, nearly tears the small community apart. Helping Rocky Comfort’s citizens to rationalize their vices and weaknesses, Semon Dye then uses their flaws to his own advantage. Offering no forgiveness for their actions and no justification for his own, he confronts the people of Rocky Comfort with their own sins as he gambles, drinks, carouses, and fights along with them. Culminating in a tumultuous, ecstatic revival, Journeyman is filled with insights into human nature and the physical and emotional components of religious fervor. This volume reprints the complete text of Journeyman as it was first published, before the more widely circulated edition, expurgated in the aftermath of the legal battles waged against God’s Little Acre, was released.

Sacriledge of Alan Kent

As Mary Hood writes in her foreword, ‘The Sacrilege of Alan Kent is unique. Comparisons are not odious, they are impossible. There is nothing like it in any of Caldwell’s published works, nor can we find its example in all of American literature.’Alan Kent is a wanderer, a seeker. Driven by, or fleeing from, unnamed forces, he struggles against the hardening effects of a brutal and indifferent world. In a series of episodes, Erskine Caldwell tells the semiautobiographical story of Kent’s childhood, roving early manhood, and transformation into an artist. The episodes, which range from brief, graphic sketches to one sentence impressions, are filled with elemental images of light and darkness, blood and water, earth and sky. Although an early work, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent shows readers the poetic economy, stark naturalism, and concern for the South’s poorest people that became the hallmarks of Caldwell’s later work.

Trouble in July

Through the summer twilight in the Depression era South, word begins to circulate of a black man accosting a white woman. In no time the awful forces of public opinion and political expediency goad the separate fears and frustrations of a small southern community into the single mindedness of a mob. Erskine Caldwell shows the lynching of Sonny Clark through many eyes. However, Caldwell reserves some of his most powerful passages for the few who truly held Clark’s life in their hands but let it go: people like Sheriff Jeff McCurtain, who did nothing to disperse the mob; Harvey Glenn, who found Clark in hiding and turned him in; and Katy Barlow, who withdrew her false charge of rape only after Clark was dead.

Georgia Boy

In this collection of 14 interrelated stories, 12 year old William Stroup recounts the ludricrous predicaments and often self imposed hardships his family endures. Beneath the book’s folksy lightheartedness, however, lie the problems of indigence, racism, and apathy that Caldwell confronted repeatedly in his fiction.

A Place Called Estherville

With a true American voice, Caldwell presents a searing view of the tragic struggles of a black brother and sister in their attempt to survive the racism and perverse sexuality of their brutal Southern employers.

Men and Women

A collection of Caldwell’s finest short stories moves deftly from youth to old age. Caldwell shows great perception of adolescent awakening to awareness of physical love and the often humorous tribulations of youthful courtship. Marriage and aspects of love and life in later years are the subjects of further stories, as well as an astute glance at old age and death before finishing with the fantastic story of the fly in the coffin.

The Stories of Erskine Caldwell

This collection of ninety six stories was first published in 1953 and presents the best of Erskine Caldwell’s short fiction from his most productive period of work. Included is ‘Crown Fire,’ which James Dickey praised as ‘the best story in the language,’ and such personal favorites of Caldwell as ‘Country Full of Swedes,’ ‘The Windfall,’ ‘Horse Thief,’ ‘Yellow Girl,’ and ‘Kneel to the Rising Sun.’

You Have Seen Their Faces

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South from South Carolina to Arkansas to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America’s desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

Call It Experience

This memoir presents an engaging self portrait of Erskine Caldwell’s first thirty years as a writer, with special emphasis on his long and hard apprenticeship before he emerged as one of the most widely read and controversial authors of his time. While conveying the enormous amount of drive and dedication with which he pursued the writer’s life, Caldwell tells of his struggles to find his own voice, his travels, and his various jobs, which ranged from back breaking common labor to much sought after positions in radio, film, and journalism. Such literary personages as Nathanael West, Maxwell Perkins, and Margaret Mitchell appear in Call It Experience, as does Margaret Bourke White, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects and whom he also married. Including a self interview, Call It Experience offers a wealth of insights into Caldwell’s imagination, his sources of inspiration, and his writing habits, as well as his views on critics and reviewers, publishers, and booksellers. It is a source of both information and inspiration to aspiring writers.

In Search of Bisco

In 1965, more than five decades after his forced estrangement from his black boyhood friend Bisco, Erskine Caldwell set out across the South to find him. On the journey, which took him from South Carolina to Arkansas, Caldwell spoke to many people on the pretense of asking Bisco’s whereabouts: a black college professor in Atlanta, Georgia; a white real estate salesman in Demopolis, Alabama; a black sharecropper in the Yazoo Basin of the Mississippi Delta; a transplanted white New England housewife in Bastrop, Louisiana; and others. Eighteen of those conversations, with Caldwell’s commentary, make up this book. Caldwell made his journey at the zenith of the civil rights movement. Bisco, whom Caldwell never found, becomes a symbol for the South’s race problem, to which he sought an answer in the emotions, experiences, and attitudes of those he encountered.

Deep South

Portraying a region steeped religious piety and ritual, excess and prejudice, Deep South is a product both of Erskine Caldwell the storyteller and Erskine Caldwell the minister’s son. Reverend Ira Sylvester Caldwell’s missionary work took him and his family deep into the region commonly referred to as the Bible Belt. His son, Erskine, was at his side on innumerable home visits with the elderly, sick, and poor of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida. By the time the younger Caldwell left home at seventeen, he had also witnessed such varieties of religious experience as ‘Church of God all night camp meetings, Holy Roller exhibitions on splintery wooden floors, primitive Christian baptismal immersions in muddy creeks, Seventh Day Adventist foot washings, Body of Christ blood drinking communions, Kingdom of God snakehandlings, Full Redeemer glossolalia services, Fire Baptized Holiness street corner rallies, Catholic mass at midnight on Christmas Eve, the rituals of Jewish synagogues, and…
philosophical lectures in Unitarian churches.’Decades later, Caldwell drew on this fertile background when he toured Georgia and neighboring states in order to hear firsthand from ministers and churchgoers about how southern Protestantism was faring amid the social upheaval of the mid 1960s. Deep South offers a rich mix of anecdotes, memories, interviews, and observations that point to what may be the true essence of southern spirituality.

With All My Might

In With All My Might, his definitive autobiography, Caldwell tells about his work as a cotton picker, stagehand, professional football player, and war correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. In 1932, Erskine Caldwell’s first novel, Tobacco Road, was the center of controversy. Some critics condemned the book; others considered it to be the work of a genius. Today Caldwell’s fifty plus books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, and his stature as a writer has been firmly established. In With All My Might, his definitive autobiography, Caldwell tells about his work as a cotton picker, stagehand, professional football player, and war correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. He describes his four marriages including the much publicized divorce from photographer Margaret Bourke White. He writes of the sacrifices he made and the rejections he suffered during the years he was struggling to have his work published.

Selected Letters: 1929-55

‘I’m just an ordinary writer,’ Erskine Caldwell once wrote. ‘I’m not trying to sell anything; I’m not trying to buy anything. I’m just trying to present my vision of life.’ His ostensibly unsolicitous vision of Southern grotesques, of the slack jawed, pellagra ridden sharecroppers, repressed farmwives, and oversexed nymphets, elicited, however, anything but an ‘ordinary’ response. Hailed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, reviled by others as a po*rnographer or sensationalist, Caldwell was once called ‘America’s most popular author.’ Once the furor flagged, Caldwell was relegated to the ‘mansions of subliterature,’ where his reputation resides today. This book contains more than 150 previously unpublished letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955, at the peak of Caldwell’s popularity and influence, all extensively annotated. The Introduction assays Caldwell’s significance in American popular culture and literary studies and establishes the importance of Caldwell’s correspondence as a means of understanding the intentions of a man who was otherwise terse and unforthcoming about his work.

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