Tobacco Road
Tobacco Road,novel by Erskine Caldwell, published in 1932. The sensational dramatization by Jack Kirkland (1933) had a continuous run of 3182 Broadway performances.
In the squalid, cotton-raising backcountry of contemporary Georgia live the sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his miserable, starving family, which includes his sick wife Ada, his neglected mother, his 16-year-old son Dude, and his repulsive, hare-lipped daughter Ellie May. Nearby lives the railroad worker Lov Benson, who has recently married Jeeter's 12-year-old daughter Pearl. Lov comes to ask Jeeter's aid in forcing the unwilling Pearl to sleep with him, and, while Lov's attention is diverted by the sex-hungry Ellie May, Jeeter steals the turnips that Lov has been carrying. The Lesters devour Lov's turnips, being joined by ugly Sister Bessie Rice, a widowed preacher who then leads them in penitential prayer. It is six years since Jeeter has been able to plant cotton, because he has...
[The entire page is 301 words long]
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