Caldwell, Erskine - William Du Bois (essay date 1943)

William Du Bois (essay date 1943)

SOURCE: "Southern laughter," in The New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1943, p. 6.

[In this review, Du Bois considers Georgia Boy "an unalloyed delight" and declares that one "would have to go back to Huck Finn to find a more companionable storyteller" than William Stroup, the narrator of these linked stories.]

Erskine Caldwell has come back from the steppes at last. He returns with a heart-warming book about the South he understands so completely, a book in which the Caldwell trademarks of dry rot, degeneracy and despair are conspicuous by their absence. His admirers may rejoice now that his stint as a Russian correspondent has ended.

Georgia Boy might well have been subtitled "life With Father on the Tobacco Road." The comparison between Clarence Day and the Morris Stroup of these light-hearted sketches is inevitable—and more apparent than real. Both characters are...

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