In the course of a relationship that lasted for six years, three as illicit lovers and three as husband and wife, Caldwell and Bourke-White collaborated to produce four books, two of which dealt with people in the United States. Late in 1940, they set out on a cross-country journey that resulted in a book much different from You Have Seen Their Faces. Say, Is This the U.S.A. is a hodge-podge that lacks the unity of the earlier collaboration. Appearing when Americans were passionately engaged in debate over their country's response to war in Europe, the later book is by and large a celebration of America.¹

From St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to San Diego, California, writer and photographer attempted to capture the strength and diversity of a great nation. Yet when they reached the South, whose treatment occupies one-fifth of the volume's contents, Caldwell's focus was racial injustice. In Soso, Mississippi, a black school principal complained about inequities in salaries paid to black teachers and to white ones. On the occasions that he mentioned the matter to whites, some suggested that “if half the Negro children dropped out of school, we would need only half as many teachers, and then the ones that were left could get twice as much salary.” In Jacksonville, Florida, a young black coffin-maker lived underground because of his fear of white people. Daylight reminded him that “back up in Georgia they put me on the chain gang for three years because I owed a white man eleven dollars.” In Saluda, South Carolina, two forlorn young black men sat in jail, the charges against them not specified, while “quite a few peeping-toms … and a lot more beer-drinkers driving cars” remained at large. Caldwell knew why: “it is much more trouble to bring in white boys.”²

Following the trip that produced Say, Is This the U.S.A., Caldwell traveled in February 1941 to the mid-South on assignment for McCall's magazine to report on farm conditions. After interviewing an influential planter in southeastern Missouri who was active in trying to improve tenant conditions, an official of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Little Rock, Arkansas, and impoverished tenants in the lower Mississippi Valley, Caldwell concluded that the South contained “more landless people than ever before.” Their situation, he wrote, “is as critical as this nation has ever seen.” Tenants not yet dispossessed suffered from malnutrition—their diets lacking milk, meat, and green vegetables—and lived in shacks that “look like pig pens.” The destitute and the dispossessed, many of whom wanted to remain on the land because “farming is in their blood,” were the victims of agricultural mechanization and of misguided federal policy that valued staple crops over food products. Land of their own, crop diversification, and scientific cultivation would enable those still farming to continue to practice their craft. Although the FSA was doing as much as it could to help the landless, its resources, Caldwell suggested, were inadequate. He realized, too, that the abandonment of staple-crop agriculture was a difficult task; tenants planted on orders from landlords, who grew the cash crops that satisfied creditors. Implicit in his essay was the suggestion that the government find a better way to provide land “and marketing facilities” to those threatened with dispossession. Already, he asserted, the farm problem had become “a national emergency,” not just a regional one. If war came, how could the United States “have an all-out national effort” when millions of its people were malnourished?³

A week after his trip to the lower Mississippi Valley to gather material for the McCall's article, “Flight from the Land,” Caldwell was in Birmingham, Alabama, to participate in a radio program. “Town Meeting of the Air,” a weekly production of the National Broadcasting Company devoted to the study of current events and pledged to the promotion of “unity through understanding,” dealt in its Birmingham segment with the topic, “Are We a United People?” The purpose of that program was to examine southern backwardness as a source of national disunity and to assay the reasons for the South's deficiencies.⁴

In addition to Caldwell, the participants were John Temple Graves II of the Birmingham Age-Herald and Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Speaking first, Ethridge, whom Caldwell had met as an adolescent when the journalist worked for the Macon Telegraph, focused on the colonial nature of the South's economy. He maintained that unfair trade practices—in particular, discriminatory freight rates imposed by northeastern industry and sanctioned by the federal government—did much to insure that the South remained a dependency of the imperial North.⁵

Caldwell followed Ethridge at the microphone. Ever a poor public speaker, Caldwell, his six-foot frame hunched over a table that was too low, read rapidly from his script, never looking up. Ever concerned with the plight of the southern poor, he placed the blame for the region's problems elsewhere than had Ethridge, “No longer,” he said, could southerners “shift the blame for our shortcomings to the shoulders of the North.” For seventy-five years the South had failed to deal adequately with its problems. Southerners must elect to office leaders who would express “the will of the people.” The passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act, a federal wages-and-hours law that had been opposed by many of the region's industrialists engaged in “the exploitation of Southern labor,” showed that the people's wishes could receive political expression. Even so, two great obstacles to regional prosperity remained: one-crop agriculture and racism. Afraid that the agrarian way of life was dying, he called for crop diversification to insure its existence because in the future of “agricultural America … lies our survival as a democratic state or our decline as a people.” Proclaiming himself “a Georgia-born Southerner,” Caldwell, on stage in the heart of Dixie before an audience of more than a thousand people, forthrightly denounced the region's treatment of blacks. “The Negro for too long has been a slave. … America cannot afford to have a portion of its people enslaved socially and economically. In the South today there are Negroes who are being denied adequate education. There are some in agriculture bound to child labor. Some are subjected to substandards of living.” Southerners, he concluded, should cease following the lead of politicians and newspaper editors who promoted sectional acrimony and instead come to grips with the region's internal problems.⁶

Speaking last, Graves, an accomplished lecturer, was charged with responding to Ethridge and Caldwell. Stating that the South suffered from “comparative poverty, the worst poverty to be found this side of the slums of New York City,” he repudiated the “would-be saviors who think all our Southern roads are named ‘Tobacco.’” Uneasy over Caldwell's focus on the race issue, “the most difficult and delicate … problem with which any people anywhere ever had to deal,” Graves contended that only well-intentioned white southerners should be trusted to handle the matter. The ideas of both men, he averred, impeded the quest for the national unity needed to face Adolf Hitler. To call for domestic reform in the “present international situation” was unwise. Instead, there should be “a moratorium on every crusade, on every political, class, group, regional, or economic ambition in this country.”⁷

Such a suggestion, Caldwell responded, was “absolutely wrong 100 percent.” In the United States, he continued, “we have something we should work on before we tackle something outside of America.” For whatever reasons, Graves's remarks were “the most roundly applauded”; Caldwell's, the most loudly rejected.⁸

If Caldwell was unpopular with the students, professors, and relatively affluent urbanites who composed the audience at Birmingham-Southern College, such people likewise ranked low among his interests. For more than ten years, he had been writing about forgotten people in out-of-the-way places. Throughout the 1940s, he would encourage other writers to do so as well.

Building upon his interest in the lives of the folk throughout the United States shown in Some American People, Caldwell, by the late 1930s, had conceived the idea of a series of books that would examine American folkways. The volumes would be broader in scope than were those of the Rivers of America series and would deal more with the people themselves than did the American Guide series of the Federal Writers Project. Caldwell envisioned American Folkways as a major endeavor, perhaps twelve or fourteen books. His publisher, Viking Press, refused to undertake such a sweeping project that might lose money. Along with other issues, that refusal led Caldwell to make the fateful decision to seek another publisher. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, a new house eager to have an author as established as Caldwell on its list, agreed to publish American Folkways.⁹

So insured, Caldwell, late in 1939, left New York on a cross-country trip to enlist authors for the series. Bourke-White, his wife of nine months, could not accompany him because she was on assignment in war-torn Europe for Life, whose staff she had joined at the magazine's inception late in 1936. “I have been on the move for the past eighteen days,” Caldwell wrote to friends, “and yet I'm only 3/4 across the country. My car shows that I've traveled 4,000 miles … and it'll undoubtedly show 10,000 by the time I get back.” On the trip, which covered fifteen thousand miles, he caught chicken pox, which gave him, he wrote his parents, “a good excuse to rest for a week.”¹⁰

By the end of the year, five writers had consented to contribute to American Folkways. Caldwell, however, had not found a writer to cover Tobacco Road country—and he never would. That he should write the volume on the sandhills South does not seem to have entered his thinking. In the spring of 1941, the first two books in the series appeared, both of which dealt with the Southwest.¹¹

Throughout the forties, Caldwell devoted considerable time to American Folkways, which he described as having “no kinship whatsoever to the school of glorified road maps and quaint lore.” Instead, the series intended to examine “the habits of thought and behavior of Americans from the point of view of the very men and women who propagated the national culture.” That culture was the product of the rich diversity of American regions, whose molding influences showed “like a shining badge” on their inhabitants. Under Caldwell's editorship, which lasted for fifteen years, the series covered more than twenty cultural regions that spanned the length and breadth of the country.¹²

Of the twenty-five volumes published while Caldwell was editor, six dealt with southern regions from Kentucky to Florida. Some of the southern authors were established figures: Hodding Carter, Mississippi journalist; Harnett T. Kane, New Orleans writer; and Herman Clarence Nixon, political scientist, social historian, and whilom Nashville Agrarian. The others were relatively unknown: Jean Thomas, the “traipsin' woman” of the Kentucky mountains; Otto Ernest Rayburn, a close student of Ozark culture; and Stetson Kennedy, a young Floridian.¹³

Some idea of Caldwell's role as editor can be gained from his extensive correspondence with Kennedy from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1942. Kennedy, who had served as chairman of a committee on folk arts of the New Deal's Florida Writers Project, had first commanded Caldwell's notice when Caldwell helped to judge a contest in documentary writing. The editor was happy to learn that the author he desired was interested in writing the proposed volume. Caldwell believed that Kennedy understood his wish “to throw the word ‘folklore’ out the window, for our purposes, and to create the usage of the term ‘folkways,’” which meant “the study of contemporary life in terms of its social and economic implications.” With such understanding established, Caldwell asked only that Kennedy supply “a readable, interesting history.” Anything else, he wrote, “is up to you. There is no working plan to impose upon an author. The author creates his own method out of his own material.”¹⁴

Caldwell insisted, however, that the volume, as had others in the series, cover a cultural region, not a political division. Kennedy should expand his subject to include not only Florida but also the southern parts of Georgia and Alabama. Caldwell insisted, too, that the title not mislead the book's readers. Kennedy wanted the title to be “Cracker Country.” Caldwell objected: “‘cracker,’” he reminded Kennedy, “is associated universally with the state of Georgia, and there is no way in the world of getting away from that fact.” He much preferred another title, “Palmetto Country,” because he considered it more descriptive and less confusing. He did not realize that readers unmindful of the difference between cultural region and political division would expect the book to be about South Carolina, the “Palmetto State.” After reading some of Kennedy's chapters in draft, Caldwell cautioned him against quoting excessively. The volumes in the series, he reminded the young writer, were supposed to reflect “the individuality of the authors.”¹⁵

After six months' work, Kennedy was convinced that the instructions to authors needed to be more specific. Therefore, he drew up a prospectus that was much more detailed than the one the editor had composed at the outset of the series. Admitting that the idea of such guidelines had never occurred to him “in quite so absolute a form,” Caldwell embraced Kennedy's proposal, secured the publisher's endorsement, and supplied the instructions to other writers in the series. The new prospectus gave a greater sense of direction to the authors, and at the same time it reiterated Caldwell's concern that each “give his book a maximum of individuality, a distinctive flavor typical of his region's folkways.”¹⁶

As Kennedy pushed ahead with his manuscript, he sought Caldwell's advice regarding subjects to be treated. The editor suggested that the author consider covering Florida's tourists—the rich ones in Palm Beach and the poorer ones in trailer camps throughout the state. “By all means include lynching,” Caldwell wrote. “The institution of the chain-gang should not be overlooked either.” Although Kennedy's book failed to mention the wealthy of Palm Beach and the trailer-camp tourists and included only a few references to lynching—omitting the notorious Claude Neal case of 1934—it contained a chapter on penal conditions. “Waitin on Time” was a strong indictment of chain-gang abuses and of racism in the administration of justice.¹⁷

The editor was especially impressed with the chapter entitled “Jook Tour.” Wild and woolly roadhouses, jook joints, Kennedy wrote, were as “Southern as jazz, fried chicken, corn bread, channel cats, chewing tobacco, and lynching.” Popular among poor, working people who led hard lives, the jooks were “rank weeds springing from a corroded culture.” Filled with anecdotal humor, “Jook Tour” nonetheless revealed Kennedy's anger over conditions that produced places where young women could be brained with beer bottles.¹⁸

Caldwell liked “Jook Tour” so much that he suggested Kennedy double its length. He also particularly admired another chapter, “Red Lights Glowing.” But he advised Kennedy that his description of prostitution “might be troublesome.” If the chapter, wherein Kennedy cited specific instances of prostitution in his hometown of Jacksonville, was “to beat the censor's heavy pencil,” then the discussion of the subject must have “a more folkway treatment.” Caldwell advised the author to “bring out the human elements in … [prostitution] by showing what position it assumes in everyday life in the region.” Moreover, Caldwell suggested, “try to make [the chapter] … parlor reading for the housewives of Des Moines.”¹⁹

Kennedy incorporated Caldwell's suggestions. Without diminishing the force of his indictment, he expanded his description of prostitution to include other parts of palmetto country beyond Jacksonville. He also sought to portray “the human elements.” Prostitutes “are made, not born,” he pointed out, and poverty, more than anything else, was what made them. Whether the chapter was palatable to the housewives of Des Moines, or, what is more to the point, to the housewives of palmetto country, can only be conjectured. Even as published, it must have been strong meat for many readers. Because black brothels charged lower rates than white ones, they enjoyed, Kennedy wrote, “a considerable amount of white trade.” Moreover, he reported the comments of a Jacksonville taxi driver who had taken “white prostitutes (personally known to him) to the homes of well-to-do Negro men.”²⁰

As Kennedy neared completion of his manuscript, Caldwell offered suggestions on the placement of chapters and on the extent to which the history of the region should be covered. Believing that “historical matter … is … ordinarily … rather dull,” Caldwell advised Kennedy to compress that material “as much as possible without losing the important facts necessary to understand ‘Palmetto Country.’” Only one-fifth of the volume's 340 pages comprises historical narrative, and much of that is based on folk sources. Most of the history deals with slavery and with Reconstruction, and it examines those subjects from a perspective sympathetic to blacks.²¹

Meeting the publisher's deadline, Kennedy completed his manuscript by mid-May 1942. An enthusiastic Caldwell wrote him a few days later. He had done “a fine job. Palmetto Country is a book to be proud of.” It would be “an outstanding addition to American Folkways.” When Palmetto Country came out late in the fall, the author of a syndicated book-review column agreed. Kennedy's volume, John Selby wrote, “is the best of the ‘country’ books so far.” So impressive was the author's command of his material that Selby accorded the book even higher praise. Palmetto Country, he contended, “ranks in usefulness with the Federal Guides, still the most valuable contribution to American life of any recent books.”²²

Many of the volumes in American Folkways failed to approach Kennedy's achievement. years later, Caldwell opined that only half of the books should have been published, that there had been too many too fast. The twenty-five that he edited doubled the number that he had initially envisioned. Moreover, even though he had traveled through much of America, what he knew best was the South. He lacked the experience to make informed judgments on works dealing with other regions, although some of those books were well received by reviewers.²³

Even so, for much of his fifteen-year tenure, Caldwell was an indefatigable editor with a boundless enthusiasm for the project. His interest was so great that, shortly after embarking on a photojournalistic trip to the Soviet Union with Bourke-White, he wrote to his secretary to remind her to correspond occasionally with the Folkways authors “so that you will be familiar with the situation regarding each individual writer.” He also asked his secretary to send copies of reviews of the first volume, scheduled to appear soon. From Moscow, in mid-June 1941, as he, his wife Margaret, and millions of Russians worriedly awaited an imminent German invasion, he wrote to Kennedy regarding his suggestions for a more thorough prospectus for the series.²⁴

Kennedy appreciated Caldwell's work. Shortly before Doubleday published his Southern Exposure late in 1946, he wrote to his former editor, “Had it not been for your kind invitation to write Palmetto Country, I would probably still be struggling with the little magazines. Your editorial guidance on that job has also stood me in good stead on this one.” Another contributor wrote to the publisher to express his appreciation of the editor's efforts. “Caldwell is a wonderful editor to work for,” said George Milburn. “I haven't had anyone spur me on to my best effort in the way he does since H. L. Mencken was editing the American Mercury.” Perhaps the highest praise came from the American Folklore Society, which, early in 1945, invited Caldwell to become a member.²⁵

The commendations of folklorists and of the series' authors were balanced by the ongoing coolness of the publisher toward the project. Throughout the life of the series, Duell, Sloan and Pearce complained of the costs involved, even though Caldwell was paid very little for his editing responsibilities and the series during the 1940s earned a profit. In 1954, still convinced that some of the volumes had made important contributions to the understanding of American character but tired of wrangling with the publisher, he resigned the editorship.²⁶

By Caldwell's account, his motive for initiating American Folkways was “to promote the regionalism of the country. I've always been a regional writer, and I think the best writing is regional.” In the early 1940s, however, he was not able to devote much time to writing about the South. During his extended trip to the Soviet Union in 1941 with Bourke-White, he placed himself in danger in order to witness fighting between German soldiers and Russian partisans, and he covered, again at great risk, the German aerial bombardment of Moscow for CBS radio. His experiences resulted in four books: one, a collaboration with Bourke-White; two others, accounts of the air raids and the partisan fighting, respectively; the last, a novel dealing with guerrilla warfare.²⁷

Amid all his activities in Russia, which also included filing reports to the North American Newspaper Alliance, Caldwell made time—to the consternation of his wife—to work on a cycle of short stories set in the South that he had begun in 1937. After returning to the United States late in 1941, he continued to work on the story cycle during the next year, finishing the last story on his birthday.²⁸

He completed the book amid domestic turmoil. The passion that he and Bourke-White shared was not enough to save their union. His stony silences, which indicated his disapproval of something that she had done, unnerved her. That they had not had a child saddened him. Dejected when she was away on assignment, he resented her long absences. She resented his resentment. Each was self-centered and each tried to dominate the other. Both were more committed to their work than to their marriage.²⁹

In the spring of 1942, not long after their third anniversary and not long after they lost their unborn child, Bourke-White asked Life to give her another assignment to cover the war. After her departure for Europe in August, Caldwell left their home in Connecticut and journeyed west, eventually arriving in California, where he wrote a script about the war for Hollywood's moviemakers. By early autumn, he had settled in Tucson, Arizona. There, he soon met a pretty, twenty-year-old coed named June Johnson. Five days before Christmas, he secured a divorce from Bourke-White in Mexico. Never a man to be without a woman for very long, he married June the next day.³⁰

The story cycle was published in the spring of 1943. Different from his previous fiction, although not as dissimilar as the publisher and many reviewers proclaimed, the fourteen stories in Georgia Boy chronicle the doings in sandhills Georgia of the Stroup family—father Morris, mother Martha, and son William—and their black yard boy, the orphaned Handsome Brown. The stories are a tour de force in terms of narrative, told from the viewpoint of twelve-year-old William, who reports matter-of-factly the antics of a ne'er-do-well father whom the boy nonetheless respects.³¹

Morris, who occupies center stage in most of the stories, lies, cheats, steals, runs after women, and abuses the yard boy. As in much of Caldwell's earlier fiction, the humor that is employed to describe Morris's escapades heightens the horror of his actions. What kind of man would bring another woman to his house with his wife present? What kind of man would enjoy loafing while his wife takes in laundry to support the family? What kind of man would take his son's quarter to attend a carnival girly-show? What kind of man would suggest a fishing trip with his son and then cavalierly cancel it to engage in a get-rich-quick scheme that involves theft? What kind of man would steal from an orphan who works for him without pay and would also humiliate the boy publicly?³²

Handsome Brown, being black, can do little about the sorry treatment Morris affords. William, being twelve years old, only wants the company of a father who is gone much too often. Martha, being white and grown, wreaks a satisfying revenge on a poor excuse for a human being. In a story that was the third one written in the cycle but that, significantly, was placed last in Georgia Boy, Martha cooks Morris's prize gamecock for supper. After the family has eaten, she tells him that College Boy was the staple of the chicken pie. Her motive, to avenge her mortification over her husband's cock-fighting, does not diminish the audacity of her act. That William is as outraged as Morris by Martha's act highlights a major theme of Georgia Boy: a boy's love for his father. Although Morris provides most of the humor in the stories, the author's sympathies lie with a neglected boy, with a dependent young black man, and, most of all, with a strong, long-suffering woman. Martha, Caldwell wrote to his publisher, “bears the cultural load of her community as well as that of raising her family with the grace of any woman who has been supporting herself and [her] household by washing and ironing for as long as she can remember.”³³

Contrary to the publisher's description, which Caldwell considered simplistic, the book is much more than “an invitation to laughter.” The author attempts to undertake a serious examination of the plight of women and blacks. Yet the narrative point of view, although skillfully executed, prevents him from doing what he did best: constructing a story that was both artistically satisfying and socially significant. He was not able fully to employ the focus of narration to exhibit his anger over the treatment of outcasts. He could not make William Stroup a Huckleberry Finn. Moreover, he failed to provide an environmental explanation for the shiftlessness of the central character, Morris Stroup.³⁴

It is difficult to ascertain the socioeconomic status of the Stroups. The reader can only assume that the reason they do not live on the farm they own is that Morris refuses to work it. In the town of Sycamore, where the family lives and where Morris has more opportunity to philander and to engage in scams, Martha is the provider. Whatever else they are, the Stroups are not poor-whites, although the publisher presented them as such and some reviewers, including southerners, perceived them as such, even comparing them to the Lesters of Tobacco Road. As Caldwell knew, poor-whites would not be landowners, as the Stroups are; a poor-white would not be a member of a social club, as Martha is; a poor-white would not receive a political appointment, as Morris does.³⁵

Here and there across the South, reviewers expressed relief over the work of a new Caldwell. An “eminently satisfying story,” Georgia Boy was, according to one wild misreading, “good, clean fun.” Southerners, wrote a Georgian, “can rest easy, as Mr. Caldwell has decided to quit advertising the unfortunate conditions of ‘Tobacco Road.’” The following year, Caldwell would prove that reviewer dead wrong.³⁶

Tragic Ground, a novel often compared to Tobacco Road, reaffirmed Caldwell's everlasting concern for the southern poor. A far cry, however, from Tobacco Road in locale and in execution, Tragic Ground signaled a serious decline in his art. Morris Stroup is no Jeeter Lester, and neither is Spence Douthit, the protagonist of Tragic Ground. A year's unemployment, the result of the shutdown of a war plant in an unnamed Gulf Coast city, fails to explain Spence's shiftlessness. Although he is not mean, only twice do his actions evoke the reader's sympathy. When he hears the story of his teenage daughter's friend, who has become a prostitute since her widowed mother abandoned her, he “brushed the back of his hand over his eyes.” Later, after he learns that his thirteen-year-old daughter, who has also turned to prostitution, has been sent to reform school for five years, he “brushed away tears that had begun to blind him.” His sympathy for an abandoned girl and his belated concern for his daughter's welfare are hardly sufficient to balance his otherwise reprehensible behavior.³⁷

Spence peppers his talk, especially in conversations with women, with expressions that would have made Jeeter blush—“dogbite my pecker” and “I was feeling like a rabbit with his balls caught in a sewing machine”—and relishes the prospect of living on welfare. Jeeter, facing greater obstacles, always hoped to plant a crop. If Caldwell intended to show that merely moving from the country to the city could make a Spence of a Jeeter, he failed. Historical forces go far toward explaining Jeeter's plight; there is no such explanation of Spence's condition. Although shiftless in the country, Spence, upon moving to the city, falls too far too fast to be credible. If Caldwell did not believe that the Jeeter Lesters of the South were beyond redemption, he suggests that the Spence Douthits are incorrigible. At the novel's conclusion, after social workers have arranged to take the family back to its home in the country, Spence confides to his wife, Maud, that he intends to return to the urban slum of Poor Boy. “You just can't keep digging a man up by the roots and setting him down in different parts of the country and expect him to be satisfied for the rest of his life.” Three years of experiencing the city's attractions—dives, gambling dens, and whorehouses—have had an irreversible impact on a weak man like Spence.³⁸

The characterization of Spence demonstrates Caldwell's belief in individual accountability. After listening to Spence deny any responsibility for his condition, Jim Howard Vance, a wounded soldier and the author's spokesman, who is sympathetic to the plight of his prospective father-in-law, tells him flatly: “You can get out” of Poor Boy. Spence believes, however, that fate has determined his condition and that to struggle is pointless. He is resigned “to living out the remainder of his years … on bounty or luck.”³⁹

Floyd Sharp, Spence's neighbor who had also worked at the defunct war plant, is not so resigned. Unlike Spence, who does not mind being supported by his hardworking twenty-year-old daughter, Floyd attempts to be self-reliant. Desperately trying to provide for his wife and their eight young daughters and to maintain his dignity, the forty-five-year-old Floyd operates a small store in Poor Boy because he cannot find a job elsewhere. Earning barely enough to keep his family from starving and far from enough to enable them to return to the country, he nonetheless resists the temptation to sell marijuana, although other men in the shantytown do. Agonizingly, he watches his oldest daughter, who is only twelve, turn to the streets. When he discovers her having sex with a pimp—who, begging for his life, claims that she, hoping to earn fifty cents, was the instigator—he kills him. “I ain't sorry,” he tells Spence. “I'd do it all over again if I had to. … I've done my duty.” Later, after he decides not to burn Poor Boy to the ground because, with all of its vice and squalor, it provides the only shelter its poverty-ridden inhabitants have, Floyd plans to confess his crime to the authorities. He reasons that confessing will enable him to expose the desperation that Poor Boy breeds. Moreover, to confess will furnish a way to provide for his children. The authorities, he tells Spence, will “send me away for a while, but they'll put my girls in a home and take care of them.” When Jim Howard, the most perceptive of the characters, learns that Floyd has confessed, he predicts that the court will probably “send him to the chair.”⁴⁰

Although Caldwell agreed with Spence's conclusion that the murder Floyd committed was a “futile rebellion against his poverty,” he rejected Spence's contention that poverty was inevitable. His position was the same as Jim Howard's. As the novel ends, an exasperated social worker says to some Poor Boy residents, “You'd wither the soul of a saint!” Jim Howard passionately responds: “I don't think that's being fair. … It's not our fault that everything got into a mess down here. Back home people like us are just as good as people anywhere else in the world. If you want to do the right thing, you ought to put all the blame on Poor Boy, because it's Poor Boy that causes all the trouble. The finest folks in the world would get mean and bad if they had to live in a place like this.” If Caldwell found it difficult to believe that Poor Boy should bear all the blame for Spence's behavior, he contended forcefully that environment dictates Floyd's actions. Some of the poor might be irretrievably lost, he argues, but others could be saved.⁴¹

For a number of reasons, Tragic Ground is a disappointing novel. The situation upon which the story depends is implausible. In 1943, when factories across the South were running around the clock, seven days a week, and when workers were toiling double shifts, the plant near Poor Boy shuts down. Had Caldwell made the novel a story about black southerners, he could have expressed more credibly his concern for people who had been left out of the wartime boom. For countless thousands of white southerners the war brought rolls of folding money that they could not have envisioned earlier.⁴²

Tragic Ground suffers also because of its setting. The agrarian Caldwell was out of his element in the city. Yet he had no choice but to move his fiction to town if he was to continue to infuse it with social commentary as demographic change swept over the South. The flush times of the Second World War lured to the factories many of the poor white southerners who had not already been forced off the land by hard times or by New Deal policies.⁴³

Although the novel's title indicates Caldwell's seriousness of purpose, Tragic Ground lacks the power of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. In the earlier novels, his use of humor and his treatment of sex heightened the impact of his social message. In Tragic Ground, where there is little humor and much sex, they diminish that message. Unlike Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, Tragic Ground fails to lodge in the reader's memory.

Among southern reviewers, opinion was divided over the matter of Caldwell's intent in the novel. To the Charlotte News, he was not “bitterly angry that such deplorable conditions exist” but instead had told “his lurid tale with all the energy and enthusiasm of a small child attacking a dish of ice cream.” The Louisville Courier-Journal, however, after praising Caldwell for avoiding “the naive sentimentality of many social writers,” concluded: “If the novelist can contribute in part to the great task of social betterment, one must rank among the most sincere and powerful advocates of true democracy the name of Erskine Caldwell.” Although the bulk of his work confirmed that contention, the case of Tragic Ground is problematic. Jonathan Daniels perceived the ambiguity. “It is doubtful,” he wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature, “whether Tragic Ground will stir thoughtful readers as much as it pleases those who love a loud and bawdy tale.”⁴⁴

Criticism such as Daniels's perplexed Caldwell. “Sure,” he wrote to a friend, the book “is dirty in the sense that people are dirty—but to me there is no such thing. People are what they are, and if you write about what they are, you are a fraud if you try to make them appear different. … They grunt and they groan in an effort to win an existence, and it is not always pleasant to watch or to hear about. … [The novel] is not dirt for dirt's sake any more than it is art for art's sake. I am merely trying, in this work and in others, to reveal life.” Yet the life revealed in Tragic Ground is incredible and clumsily portrayed, as Caldwell himself suspected. “I don't know,” he confided to the same friend, “if the novel is any good or not. … I know it could be a lot better.” He was right; it could have been a lot better.⁴⁵

Having returned to the novel with Tragic Ground, Caldwell would devote almost all of his writing to that form for the remainder of the 1940s. In the novels of the late forties, he was attempting to complete what he described as “a cyclorama of Southern life.” Although he acknowledged that he had “had no such plan in mind in the beginning,” by the end of the 1930s he professed to have discovered an organic pattern in his novels. Near the end of the 1940s, he wrote to a sympathetic critic that “eight or ten volumes” would be required to depict “the most important phases of community life … of a particular region in the South.” By that time, he had completed eight of the novels. Within the next two years, he would finish the cycle by writing two more.⁴⁶

From Tobacco Road to Tragic Ground, the first five novels of the cyclorama had appeared over the course of twelve years. The other five were published in a span of only five years. The decline of art so noticeable in Tragic Ground is equally apparent in most of the novels of the late 1940s. If writing about urban life was not Caldwell's forte, neither was portraying the upper class, as he attempted to do in A House in the Uplands, the first of the postwar novels. Featuring the dissolute, sadistic Grady Dunbar, a representative of fallen gentry, A House in the Uplands is more a domestic tragedy than social commentary. The master of a run-down plantation whose two hundred acres are a mere shred of its original two thousand, Grady beats his wife, refuses to make love to her, cheats with black women, drinks excessively, gambles obsessively, believes that working is beneath one of his station, and keeps his tenants, white and black, in a state of peonage. Like his forebears, he dies violently, killed in a shoot-out with the owner of a dive to whom he owed twenty-five hundred dollars in gambling debts.⁴⁷

Unlike the portrayal of Spence Douthit, the depiction of Grady Dunbar takes pains to account for the sources of his behavior. Unaccustomed to having “to count the cost of anything,” Grady's ancestors lived profligately. He expects to do so as well, even though the sterile remnant of the Dunbar plantation cannot sustain his extravagance. His arrogance and willfulness, the products of generations of such behavior, are reinforced by an indulgent mother who tells her daughter-in-law that “Grady is entitled to certain privileges.” Unknown to his mother, those privileges include the run of the quarters, where Grady, like his father and grandfather before, finds sexual gratification. It was Grady's father who introduced him to what the Dunbar men believe are the superior allurements of black women.⁴⁸

Caldwell's attempt to invest Grady's actions with an environmental explanation fails. The obstacles Grady faces are slight when compared to those confronting a character like Jeeter Lester, and the reader cannot view him sympathetically. Although Caldwell had returned to a rural setting, he peopled it with characters that could not adequately engage his imagination.

Just as the urban setting of Tragic Ground and the aristocratic protagonist of A House in the Uplands added new dimensions to Caldwell's southern fiction, so did The Sure Hand of God. In that 1947 novel, for the first time in an extended work, the author fashioned a woman protagonist. The recently widowed Molly Bowser—thirty-four, fat, and losing her looks—cannot find a man to provide for her and her sixteen-year-old illegitimate daughter Lily. Therefore, she tries to insure that Lily marries well. She fails, and as the story ends, having been evicted from a middle-class neighborhood, she takes up residence in the red-light district of the Georgia town in which she lives.⁴⁹

Hardly Caldwell at his best, The Sure Hand of God is nonetheless a strong novel because of the deft characterization of the protagonist. Molly—significantly, she is not given a surname until she marries at age thirty-two—knows full well that she must be agreeable to men if she is to have any chance of fashioning a decent life for herself and Lily. Her past has been hideous. She was the daughter of a tenant farmer; an orphan at twelve; the sexual object of the men in the family of the landlord who took her in and forced her to work sixteen-hour days; a mother at eighteen, unsure which of the three men in the landlord's household fathered her child; a kept woman at twenty-five. Because of her manifold misfortunes, Molly never loses sight of her goal: to prevent a similar fate befalling Lily. Yet Molly's experiences have made her a wine-bibbing, dope-shooting hedonist whose reputation, made even more unsavory by sanctimonious churchgoers, renders unattainable her desire to fashion a better life for her daughter. The comic dimension of her character makes her, like her country cousin Jeeter Lester, more fully human, and the black humor of the story makes bearable its tragedy.⁵⁰

Not since Tobacco Road had Caldwell provided a stronger environmental explanation of a character's behavior. As though to emphasize the early authorial exposition of Molly's actions, later he uses a character to explain them. The worldly-wise banker, Frank Stevens, who succeeds in dissuading his nephew Claude from marrying Lily, acknowledges that Molly “could become a respectable woman in different surroundings.” But, he asks Claude, “who's going to take the trouble” to rehabilitate her? “The time to have done that was twenty years ago.” Just as the narrative voice and a character's observations underscore Caldwell's intent, so, too, does the irony of the novel's title. It is not “the sure hand of God” that bruises Molly but the hostility of callous human beings.⁵¹

Like God's Little Acre, the novel that followed The Sure Hand of God focused upon the disintegration of a family. Unlike God's Little Acre, however, This Very Earth has an urban setting. Moving from country to town has a disastrous effect on the Crockett family. The eighty-five-year-old grandfather, born and bred on the land, tries to supply the steadying influence that his recently deceased daughter-in-law provided. His efforts to keep the family together are to no avail. He dies trying to defend a granddaughter who is the victim of a deadly assault by her husband. Another granddaughter becomes the kept woman of a congressman. Yet another leaves town to avoid the attentions of a married man. His eleven-year-old grandson, introduced to booze and black girls by his father, is sent to live with an older brother, a reputable lawyer who was raised in the country. At story's end, grandpa's son Chism, who has left the family-owned farm because he does not want to sweat “like a cussed farmer,” is alone except for his hunting dogs. The very earth that the Crocketts abandoned might have sustained them as a family.⁵²

Notwithstanding the implications of its title, This Very Earth is narrowly domestic rather than broadly social in focus. Therein lies its fundamental weakness. Despite Caldwell's concern for the plight of women, he was not able to portray Chism's grown daughters as believable characters. Molly Bowser's search for a husband is born of economic necessity. Vickie Crockett's infatuation with a sleazy politician and her sister Dorisse's thralldom to a brutish husband are insufficiently motivated, and their emotional dependency rings false. The novel suffers also from Caldwell's inability to render credibly the dialogue of romantic love, from a structure that is overly episodic, and from humor that, although appropriately rare, is flat and forced.

The pervasive poverty of the 1930s that had called forth much of Caldwell's strongest writing had abated, among white southerners at least, after the Second World War. Yet racism, the other great social evil that had evoked his best work, continued to exhibit much vitality. Because Place Called Estherville, the next novel in the cyclorama, denounces racism with great ardor, it ranks among the most socially significant of all of Caldwell's novels.

Unlike most of his previous novels, whose action occurs within a few days, Place Called Estherville covers nine months in the lives of its protagonists. Late adolescent siblings who have moved to town from the country to care for their aged, invalid aunt, Ganus and Kathyanne Bazemore are light-skinned, handsome blacks who prove to be irresistible to Estherville's whites. Ganus's innocence and good looks get him killed by the husband of a teenage slattern. Kathyanne's beauty gets her pregnant by the husband of her white employer.⁵³

The strength of the novel rests largely upon the characterization of Kathyanne. With stoic dignity she endures the advances of a respectable banker, the envy and ridicule of an employer, abduction by teenage boys bent on rape, violence at the hands of a policeman whose overtures she rejects, and an unwanted pregnancy. Despite the twin burdens of being black and female, she refuses to allow her spirit to be broken. Having suffered much, she looks forward, as the story ends, to a measure of happiness as the wife of a young black man who will help her raise her daughter.⁵⁴ In the characterization of Kathyanne, Caldwell added another new dimension to his fiction, a fully drawn black woman. Moreover, in a novel peopled by an assortment of moral dwarfs, she possesses integrity of gigantic dimensions.

So does Horatio Plowden, a minor yet significant character. Likely patterned after a physician Caldwell had known in Wrens thirty years earlier, Dr. Plowden, introduced in the final chapter, voices the author's views on the matter of race. On his way to attend Kathyanne in childbirth, the doctor meets the town's night policeman, who asks, “Who're you going to see at this time of night, Doc? Some nigger who ought be dead anyway?” Eloquently and prophetically, Plowden responds: “We're all human beings. … You're going to have to learn to treat all people alike, white and colored, or else there won't be any place for you one of these days. I know that you and a lot more like you think you can keep this a white man's town, but you're wrong. The world has changed a great deal in the last generation, and it's going to change a lot more in the next generation. I may not live to see the whole change come, but I hope you do.”⁵⁵

Within an hour the doctor lies dead, the victim of a worn-out heart exhausted by forty years of overwork. Yet he dies with the joy of having earned the gratitude of a young black woman who never before had been given reason to trust a white person. Although the conclusion of the novel approaches sentimentality, it nonetheless reflects the compassion of two decent men, character and author.⁵⁶

The high achievement of Place Called Estherville would not soon be repeated. The year after its publication, the final novel of the cyclorama appeared. Episode in Palmetto is the weakest of those novels because Caldwell failed more obviously than before at something that he could not do effectively: write a purely domestic story. Chronicling the escapades of a pretty young schoolteacher who beds not only a married man but also a sixteen-year-old boy, the novel is the stuff of soap opera, the kind of drugstore trash that critics had begun to accuse Caldwell of writing.⁵⁷

With only a few exceptions, reviewers across the South panned the novels of the late 1940s, frequently scoring Caldwell for continuing to cultivate themes whose vitality he had already depleted. If his earlier work had served a worthy purpose, the later novels were, said one critic, “a vitiated crusade against the Southern backwoods social structure.” Many charged that he seemed to be unaware of, or unwilling to record, the changes that were sweeping the South. The detractors seemed unwilling to acknowledge Caldwell's reluctance to be a chronicler of progress when many southerners had not yet enjoyed its blessings. The repetition so denounced by critics resulted in great measure from his insistence on imagining the lives of people who were being left out of the postwar boom.⁵⁸

Conspicuous among such southerners were poor women such as Molly Bowser and Kathyanne Bazemore. It is surely no accident that the most reviled of the late-1940s novels was Place Called Estherville, which features a poor black woman. The story was “dreamed-up racial tripe” that “bears for the single- or simple-minded a sermon on Southern exploitation of the black.” Caldwell seemed not to realize that among white southerners “the Negro question is not to be trifled with.” Despite renewed criticism that Caldwell was repeating himself, what frightened reviewers was the author's prophecy of changes to come in a dimension of southern life that they hoped would remain immutable.⁵⁹

Initially concerned with the plight of marginal people in hard times, Caldwell continued to create such characters as economic conditions improved. If the art of most of the postwar novels is vitiated—the result of their domestic nature and of the author's waning powers—and if the pattern the author posited for the cyclorama is difficult to discern, the compassion for the unfortunate, for those who remained on the margins of society after 1945, was nevertheless as strong as ever.

Aware that the completion of the cyclorama marked a watershed in his career, Caldwell proceeded to write his autobiography, which was published in 1951. His purpose in Call It Experience, he wrote in the book's preface, was “to set forth some of the experiences of an author which may be of interest to curious readers and would-be writers who seek visions of the wonderland in which all authors are believed to exist. … What is to be found here is less a personal history than it is an informal recollection of authorship.” True to his intent, he omitted much of his personal history, failing even to mention his ex-wife Helen and their children and his wife June and their son. Moreover, he distorted to his advantage some of the personal history that he did include. His recollection of authorship was informal with a vengeance. Call It Experience sags under a heavy load of trivia: the names of hotels where he stayed while working; the food that he ate when he visited Czechoslovakia to gather material for a book; the inconsequential, albeit humorous, anecdotes of his career as a writer. Never does he acknowledge any other author whose work might have affected him, and never does he engage in a serious discussion of the matter of literature. No doubt curious readers and would-be writers found Call It Experience entertaining. Had they known, however, how little it revealed of the self-defining experience of its author, they probably would have been deeply disappointed.⁶⁰

After completing his autobiography, Caldwell returned to writing fiction primarily. Between 1954 and 1973, he published eleven novels and thirty-two new stories. Very few of the stories, all of which appeared in the 1950s, including those published in a collection entitled Gulf Coast Stories, are distinctively southern. Although some that are southern showcase the rollicking humor that was a Caldwell trademark, hardly any convey the broad social concern of his great stories of the 1930s. One, however, provides further evidence of his enduring agrarianism. Devoid of his patented humor and sex and hardly a short story at all but rather a meditation, biblical in tone, on what constitutes the good life, “The Story of Mahlon,” in just fifteen hundred words, touchingly depicts a farmer's passion for the land. The bachelor Mahlon, his name an elision of “male alone,” resists, as Jeeter Lester does, the urgings of others to move to town and get a factory job. Uninterested also in the “pretty girls” that neighbors say he would meet in the city, Mahlon nonetheless realizes that the soil upon which he often lies prone, like a man making love, is not enough to fulfill his agrarian idyll. Lying “silently through the night with his face pressed upon the ground,” he comes to know at story's end that he needs a wife.⁶¹

Although few of the short stories possess regional characteristics, virtually all of the novels, more than half of which appeared in the 1960s, are distinctively southern. And nearly all of the southern novels demonstrate further the decline of Caldwell's art after the early 1940s. Plots clumsily constructed, characters whose actions are insufficiently motivated, humor grafted onto inappropriate situations—all, to greater or lesser degree, mar the late novels. Even the sex, by turns sleazy or quaint, grows tiresome.⁶²

Yet for all of the weakened art, the social concern continues unabated. Collectively, the novels focus on the effects of sexism and racism. Although Caldwell was usually unable in the late works to turn noble intentions into strong fiction, occasionally he fused argument and art to create a work of considerable power. Despite many flaws—misplaced humor, poor plotting, and occasionally leaden writing—Claudelle Inglish is a strong indictment of a masculine culture that forces a young woman, on the advice of her mother, to use sex to get what she wants. Roughly ten years later, The Weather Shelter, like Claudelle Inglish a work strengthened by its rural setting, offered a powerful condemnation of racism, white and black, as it also presented a poignant story of a white father's love for his mulatto son. What shines through many of the late novels, whether they are strong or weak, is Caldwell's sympathy for the social outcast, whether a retired prostitute turned boardinghouse keeper, the mulatto mistress of a morally obtuse good old boy, a black teacher whose defiance of his white tormentor brings serious injury, an adolescent mulatto pursued by a lynch mob, or a white sharecropper who loses everything dear to him.⁶³

The characterization of the sharecropper is, in fact, the finest in any of the post-cyclorama novels. Clyde Inglish, Claudelle's father, suffers the desertion of a wife who is tired of being poor, strives unsuccessfully to stop his daughter's wanton behavior, and cannot prevent her murder by a jealous suitor. His diligence, integrity, and sensitivity avail him nothing, and he is bereft of wife, daughter, and the land he loves to farm. In the agrarian Clyde, the agrarian Caldwell created the kind of character that distinguished his great work of the 1930s. Clyde Inglish is as surely the victim of forces beyond his control as are Jeeter Lester, Jesse English, Clem Henry, and other Depression-era characters.⁶⁴

Whatever were the strengths and weaknesses of Caldwell's postwar fiction, millions of readers in the late 1940s and in the 1950s were far more interested in his writing of the 1930s and early 1940s, although for reasons that often had little to do with its literary quality. Caldwell did everything in his power to fan that interest. The appearance of cheap paperbacks—many of them selling for only twenty-five cents—that swept commercial publishing after the Second World War fattened Caldwell's pocketbook. From the end of 1945 to the middle of 1951, his paperback publishers—first, Penguin Books, and, after 1947, New American Library (NAL)—issued eleven reprints of his works. Led by God's Little Acre, the paperbacks sold more than 25 million copies. Without writing a word, Caldwell became richer by nearly one hundred thousand dollars.⁶⁵

Always interested in making money, and understanding the dynamics of paperback publishing, Caldwell avidly cooperated with NAL's efforts to promote his works. Believing that a “storyteller's purpose is to reach as large a market as possible,” he tried mightily to expand that market. He lunched with the distributor's wholesalers. He posed—with his dog, Crackerjack—as a whiskey company's “man of distinction.” He tolerated the lurid covers of his paperback editions. Declaring that he would “rather move in a crowd than read,” he appeared at drugstore newsstands to autograph copies of his books for admiring throngs that were described as “Sinatra-like” in size and behavior.⁶⁶

Such shenanigans, which outraged the literary establishment, further undermined his waning reputation among critics and other writers. One incident provides telling evidence of this development. In the summer of 1948, on his way to speak to a group of aspiring writers convening at the University of Kansas, Caldwell stopped in Kansas City, Missouri, at the request of his distributor. There, as the star of the grand opening of the twenty-fifth super drugstore in the Katz chain, he spent three hours autographing copies of his books, posing for photographs with employees and customers, and chatting with anyone who wanted to make his acquaintance. When the other authors participating in the conference—among whom were the southerners Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Katherine Anne Porter—learned of the incident, they shunned him. In their view, he was a writer who brazenly courted popular favor. Although Caldwell sat politely through sessions led by other participants, when it was his turn to lecture, “the entire staff,” according to a journalist present, withdrew “for a private dinner in the ivory tower.”⁶⁷

Thirty years after the episode in Lawrence, Kansas, Caldwell's paperback publisher apologized to him in print. “If, even indirectly,” Victor Weybright of NAL wrote, “my promotion of Erskine Caldwell in the paperbound mass market has contributed to the omission of supreme critical acclaim, it is my only regret as a publisher.”⁶⁸ The damage, however, was irreparable.

As some southern writers were spurning Caldwell, many southern readers, who became familiar with his works only when they appeared in paperback, went further and damned him. With the publication of his paperbacks came an avalanche of mail. Many of the detractors who wrote to him objected to his writing trash. An outraged Louisiana minister who had purchased God's Little Acre because the title suggested “something that would be of a religious nature” charged Caldwell with trying “to ruin our young people for the sake of a few dollars.” “Man, if you know anything about praying,” the preacher continued, “you better get started to asking God to forgive you for all the harm that you have already done.” The wife of a Tennessee sharecropper, the kind of person that Caldwell had been trying to help, believed that he was beyond forgiveness, that he “should be able to sit for a picture of the Devil.” His books—she had burned the four that she owned—were not only unbelievable but were also “dirty, just plain dirty” and were “opening minds—in many cases young minds—to sin and hell.” Twenty-two high-school students in Richmond, Virginia, members of a youth crusade to clean up literature in the city, agreed that Caldwell was ruining the morals of the young. “Would you like to think that people are going to hell every day because of your works?” asked one. Another charged that his books were producing “a generation of sexual maniacs.” Yet another wondered why Caldwell wanted to “bring out the wild passionate emotions of the Southern people.” All of the adolescent correspondents believed that literature could influence thought and action. One conferred great praise when she opined, “With your power it is evident that you can change the world.” All implored Caldwell to use his talent for good and to write only wholesome, decent books.⁶⁹

At the crest of Caldwell's popularity from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, the many southerners who condemned him as a writer of trash usually based their judgment on the superior books first published in the 1930s, not on the inferior ones that he wrote subsequently. It was not, for example, the trashy Episode in Palmetto that provoked their wrath but the artistic Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.⁷⁰

If many readers were offended by what they considered obscene in Caldwell's works, others objected particularly to his treatment of race. From New Orleans came a letter calling him a “Negro loving Bas[tard].” A Georgian accused him of “traducing” his native state by supporting integration and amalgamation. His treatment of interracial sex was scathingly denounced by both a Carolina white woman and a Georgian who identified himself as “a full blooded Negro.” The white woman denied that “any decent or even bad white girls mix with Negro men.” The black man, after branding Caldwell “a dirty, lying son-of-a-bitch,” pronounced his depiction of miscegenation “a profound lie.” All of the correspondents, including the black Georgian, shared the sentiment of one who asked, “Where is your So[uthern] patriotism?” Speaking in 1948 to a civic club in a small south-Georgia city that fourteen years later would be the scene of large civil-rights demonstrations, an industrialist bluntly answered that query. “As a traitor,” he said, “Benedict Arnold was a piker compared to our Erskine Caldwell.” That Georgia worthy claimed to perceive the ultimate goal of “rabble rousers” like Caldwell: to plant “the seeds of racial hatreds to grow into the oaks of Communism.”⁷¹

The vilification continued into the 1950s. A Florida editor agreed with the sentiments of the Georgia industrialist. Decrying Caldwell's “planned calumniation of the South,” the journalist branded him a tool of race-mixing Communists. Twice in the 1950s, the state of Georgia threatened to censor certain of the miscreant's works. When a political leader in Augusta learned of plans to film God's Little Acre nearby, he exploded: “That man has done more to hurt this area and the South than any man alive.” Other Augustans agreed. The movie, which was, like the film Tobacco Road, a travesty of the novel that inspired it, was made in Stockton, California.⁷²

The calumny directed at Caldwell by southerners, however, was equaled by praise. For every letter that he received that condemned his work, there was another that extolled it. Some of the fan mail came from people desiring autographs, seeking assistance with publishing their work, or wanting Caldwell to tell the stories of their lives, many of which made his fiction seem tame. Much of the correspondence, however, came from southerners who had no ulterior purpose, who merely wanted Caldwell to know that they admired his work. And some of the correspondence antedated the appearance of his work in paperback. The publication of You Have Seen Their Faces inspired a Tennesseean to thank him “for faces which I shall never forget to see,” prompted the son of a tenant farmer to describe the work as “without a doubt the most true to life and interesting book I've ever read,” and caused a native Georgian teaching in Texas to wish Caldwell “continued goodwill” because “we need liberal Georgians, God knows.” Trouble in July brought praise from a white Georgian who said that she had long objected to the “abuse of the hapless Negro.”⁷³

As was the case with mail from detractors, letters from supporters greatly increased in number as Caldwell's books appeared in paperback after 1945. From housewives to college professors, correspondents applauded the narrative power, the realism, and the social concern of his writings. Young men—mostly college students and soldiers—were especially interested in his work. For some of those readers, the attraction came from the alluring covers of the paperbound editions and the sexual content of the fiction—Griselda Walden's “rising beauties” were particularly admired. But for many, including some who were initially drawn by the sex, the appeal of Caldwell's work was much broader. A soldier from Tennessee, who was “deeply impressed by the style” of certain short stories, estimated that Caldwell had “moved realism & Southern literature ahead a century at least,” which was an “accomplishment [that] will echo for a long time down south.” A student at the archly conservative University of the South, who had chosen Caldwell's work as the subject of a term paper because he wanted “to drag … [Caldwell] … over the coals” for maligning his hometown of Augusta, had undergone a change of heart after rereading Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Those novels, the student claimed, were “good books” that were not “overly realistic, but on the contrary … are not realistic enough.” He averred that a tour of the settings of the novels would convince critics that the speech of Caldwell's characters “is whiter than the proverbial snow compared to the real McCoy.” His fellow Georgian's short stories, the student continued, were “splendid little clippings from the great newspaper of human nature.” The young man's instructor did not share his enthusiasm for Caldwell's work. When informed of the student's topic, the professor—whose “face assumed the expression of one who has just made a meal of dill pickles dunked in the juice of green persimmons”—warned him not to expect a good grade. Another student—this one at the University of Louisville—whose father had served as an itinerant Presbyterian minister in North Carolina among Caldwellian people that the student had “learned to like and understand” labeled Caldwell “my favorite author.”⁷⁴

What was probably the first official recognition of Caldwell's work by a new generation of college students came from an unlikely place, a Baptist school in Mississippi. In 1947, the student magazine at Mississippi College ran a feature in its November number entitled “The Erskine Caldwell Crusade.” According to the editor, the article was prompted by “a long interest” among some students in Caldwell's works, especially You Have Seen Their Faces. The authors of the piece, both of whom were literary editors for the magazine, argued, as one of them recalled later, that “far from being a mere titillator and commercial-minded writer who was after the sleaze market, Caldwell was like a sociologist, writing serious studies of life as it truly was in much of the South.” Having discovered Caldwell's fiction on drugstore racks, that student, who remembered seeing unemployed Mississippians standing in bread lines years before, resented “the standard Southern Baptist view that anything Caldwell wrote was Nasty and certainly not Literature.” He believed that the sex in the fiction, while describing “a moving force” in people's lives, allowed Caldwell “to reach an audience who might be able to see the [other] facts of life he portrayed.” The magazine's editor, who claimed to speak for the student body, saluted Caldwell. “We look forward,” he concluded, “to the day when America truly means brotherhood and when the people turn in quiet dignity to pay tribute to those of vision to whom so much is due.”⁷⁵

Like these college students, other Caldwell readers who were sensitive to the South's failings would have found absurd the claim by a weekly newsmagazine in 1957 that he was a “cracker-barrel pornographer.” Time, however, influenced the opinions of millions of people; the Mississippi College Arrowhead influenced the views of virtually no one.⁷⁶

Time's savage indictment signaled the nadir of Caldwell's career. Moreover, the first five years of the 1950s had been among the worst of his life. Troubles, professional and personal, plagued him. Maxim Lieber, the literary agent who for nearly twenty years had represented him vigorously, if not always wisely, fled the country, a victim of hysterical anticommunism. Caldwell's own association with Communist fronts in the 1930s made him a target of the same hysteria. Difficulties with publishers and the waning popularity of his paperbacks among American readers added to his woes.⁷⁷

Yet professional problems paled beside personal troubles. Symptoms that suggested cancer sent Caldwell to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for extensive examinations. After seventeen days in the hospital, he was relieved to learn that his colon was not cancerous.⁷⁸

There was no relief, however, from the domestic turmoil that worried Caldwell most. His relationship with his third wife, June, who was nearly twenty years younger than he, had become strained fairly early in their marriage. He resented her many social activities because they interrupted his work. He subjected her to the same angry silences that he had inflicted on Bourke-White. For her part, June abhorred her husband's addiction to his work. She began to see herself as only an ornament, a famous writer's wife who had no identity of her own. To Caldwell's dismay, she began to visit a psychoanalyst. After many sessions over many years, the analyst, who charged fees of four hundred dollars a month, advised her not to sleep with her husband. Caldwell loathed June's addiction to her doctor. Early in 1953, June having requested separation, he left their Tucson home and moved to Phoenix. Separated from his wife, he refused to seek divorce because of his love for Jay, their eight-year-old son. Late in November 1954, June filed suit to end the marriage. After much haggling and many delays, the suit was settled twelve months later.

A little over a year after the divorce, on New Year's Day 1957, Caldwell wed for the last time. That wife, Virginia Moffett Fletcher, a woman he had seen from time to time during his troubles with June, would remain his helpmate until he died. Their happy union of thirty years equaled the span of his three previous marriages.⁷⁹

By 1960, Caldwell had abandoned his forte, the writing of short stories. Although he would publish six novels in the course of the 1960s, the nonfiction of those years is his best work of the decade. As always, his most accomplished nonfiction was travel writing, and, as in the 1930s, his best nonfiction dealt with what he knew best—the South.⁸⁰

In the travel accounts of the 1960s, Caldwell employed the method he had developed thirty years before, which combined the techniques of reporter and fiction writer. In gathering information he would make sketchy notes that usually included places, names, and other significant data. Soon thereafter, he would, as he described the process, “reconstitute—not recreate but reconstitute—the atmosphere, the tenor” of a scene or an incident. The sexagenarian Caldwell worked vigorously on the travel books. He and Virginia would rise each morning at six, spend the day in search of material, and check into a motel around four in the afternoon, when he would begin to write. During one project, he pecked at his typewriter with only one hand because his ailing one was hoisted to the ceiling to relieve pain.⁸¹

The ideas for the nonfictional works were those of his new publisher, his fourth since Scribner's thirty years before. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy wanted three books: a travel account of American life, a study of race relations in the South, and an examination of the cultural impact of evangelical Protestantism on the contemporary South. Roger Straus, more sensitive to Caldwell's talents than any editor since Perkins of Scribner's, knew his strengths: his interest in the folk, his lifelong opposition to racism, and his fascination with religious expression. Caldwell would fulfill his publisher's expectations in the first two volumes but not in the last, where his devotion to his father's memory got in the way.⁸²

A cross-country trip of 1963 resulted the next year in a book very much like Some American People, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. In Around About America, Caldwell related his observations of many things: New England character, suburban sprawl, a pool-room in Colorado, Basques in Nevada, and Indians in Oregon, to name a few. His comments on the South, which occupy one-fourth of the book, doubtless had an effect on professional southerners not unlike that of his devastating critiques of rural poverty and racism thirty years before. In the coal fields of southern West Virginia, he reported “hard-core unemployment, widespread and chronic.” Amid majestic terrain that provided breathtaking scenery but that lacked “standing room for a cow or chickens,” miners and their families lived in “shacks and hovels.” Stopgap measures such as the distribution of food stamps and the creation of makework projects hardly provided adequate solutions to a problem of such magnitude. What was needed was a “national service corps,” modeled on the recently established Peace Corps, through which displaced miners could receive training for other kinds of work and become “self-supporting and self-respecting.” Without sweeping federal action, the “waste of human resources” in this part of Appalachia would continue to present “a tragic and depressing condition in what is called dynamic, prosperous, and plentiful America.”⁸³

Just as the persistence of poverty continued to haunt Caldwell, so did the perpetuation of racism. “The segregationist,” he told a newspaper interviewer early in 1961, “is morally, sociologically and democratically wrong.” Incidents in Alabama and Georgia described in Around About America showed him the frenzy that beset white southerners over what should have been inconsequential matters. A white employee of a rental car agency at the Birmingham airport flew into a rage when a black coworker, attempting to perform his assigned task, tried to record the mileage on a car leaving the lot. “Get your goddam nigger face out of here,” the white driver shouted. “No black nigger's going to get that close to me.” Enraged by “goddam stinking niggers these days [who] act like they think they're just as good as a white man,” that worker hoped to get the black man fired. A black New Englander driving with his family to Florida also felt the sting of white prejudice. Stopping at a restaurant in south Georgia whose owner had posted signs boasting its fine food and southern hospitality for many miles along the highway, the black man was hardly surprised when the proprietor refused to seat him. Yet the owner also refused to sell him not only box lunches but even a bottle of milk for his family, which included three children, waiting in the car. “Go on down the road until you come to one of those Yankee-kind chain stores,” the proprietor yelled. “Nobody else around here is going to sell nothing to niggers.”⁸⁴

Despite such episodes and despite the ubiquity of Confederate flags—emblems that, Caldwell believed, should be displayed in museums and not atop government buildings because they insulted black southerners and symbolized rebellion against the country—in the heady atmosphere of the civil rights movement, Caldwell was sanguine about the future of race relations. His optimism derived largely from the growing awareness among blacks that they were “entitled to full citizenship.” Because of their efforts, he predicted that “equal rights and racial freedom” would be achieved within fifteen years. Moreover, he believed that “after many generations” racial assimilation “will create brotherhood.”⁸⁵

The optimism was short-lived. Subsequent to a trip taken a year after the cross-country journey described in Around About America, Caldwell engaged in little discussion of brotherhood. The organizing principle of In Search of Bisco was his attempt to locate a black man who had been his playmate in early childhood. Yet in most of the book the search for Bisco is secondary to a description of Bisco Country, the region from South Carolina to Louisiana. What Caldwell found in his first extensive nonfictional examination of the South since 1937 was hardly edifying. Just as he had delivered a two-fisted assault on poverty in You Have Seen Their Faces, he dealt a hard-hitting attack on racism in In Search of Bisco.⁸⁶

There are a few bright moments in the book, such as the account of a retired white farmer in Georgia who, having worked closely with blacks all his life, believes that support for civil rights is a moral imperative, and the portrait of a fiercely independent white man in the hills of north Alabama who angrily resents race-baiting politicians that tell him how to vote. By and large, however, the whites that Caldwell encountered were die-hard segregationists who contended that most blacks were happy with the South's racial arrangement and that unrest was created by the federal government, outside agitators, and a few local troublemakers. Occasionally, the arguments of the die-hards were merely ludicrous. An Alabama realtor and civic leader contended that black equality would be a long time coming because only with the passing of many generations would the brains of black people grow large enough to qualify them for equal treatment. More often, the arguments of the die-hards were vicious and obscene. In Mississippi, a member of the White Citizens' Council, an organization that Caldwell described as an uptown version of the Ku Klux Klan, betrayed the underlying fear of change in race relations harbored by many whites.

You go ahead and give the niggers just one little foothold and there'd be no end to what they'd want next. …

Given a chance, they'd make whores out of all white women. … You let a crowd of niggers stand around on the street corner and watch a white woman walk by and you don't have to guess a second time what they've got in mind. You'd be right the first time when you said what they were thinking about was getting their hands on her titties and their balls between her legs.⁸⁷

An Arkansas rice planter agreed. Any gains made by the civil rights movement encouraged “the niggers” to seek more. “You give them an inch … and they'll stop at nothing. They'll claim it's discrimination unless they can get white women next.” Happily, machines had replaced black men in the rice fields of the Grand Prairie, which allowed “a white woman without her titty-bags on … to go where she pleases day or night … and not get stripped naked and thrown down and nigger-raped.”⁸⁸

The fears of white racists were hardly justified. Among the eight blacks—seven men and a woman—featured in the book, none displayed an interest in interracial sex. The old ones wanted economic security. The young ones wanted economic opportunity, the chance to get a good education and to find a decent job. None evinced the racist sentiments expressed by most of the whites that Caldwell encountered, although some had compelling reasons to do so. An old Arkansas sharecropper, whose situation was reminiscent of that of Caldwell's character Abe Lathan twenty-five years before, had been forced off the land he had worked all his life. A young Mississippi sharecropper, whose landlord refused to allow him to bury his father on his land, had no choice but to inter him by the side of a road and mark his grave with a rusted bread sign.⁸⁹

The degradation of black southerners, Caldwell contended, was largely the result of the efforts of affluent whites, whose wealth usually derived from the labor of blacks. Instead of leading their fellow southerners down the right path, well-to-do whites too often failed to act ethically, took the wrong course, and encouraged poorer whites to follow them.⁹⁰

In Search of Bisco brought a reawakening of interest in Caldwell's work among southerners. Newspapers from Norfolk to Austin ran reviews of the book. Some were defensive and hostile. The Austin American-Statesman lamented that in Caldwell's rendering “there is no news but bad news and no South but a bad South.” The Pensacola News Journal found “nothing new in this one-sided slap at dear old Dixie.” Branding Caldwell a “fire-breathing liberal,” the Charleston News and Courier asked “why is it the Negroes are all sinned against and the whites all sinning?”⁹¹

In contrast to the antagonistic responses of some commentators, other reviewers across the South applauded Caldwell's portrayal of race relations in the region. In Search of Bisco was “thoughtful and thought-provoking,” “enlightening,” “eloquent and painful,” “stark [and] eloquent,” “strong … [and] moving,” “serious [and] earnest,” “biting commentary … well worth reading and studying.” Two Atlantans offered the most fervent praise. In the Daily World, Atlanta's black newspaper, Ray McIver, Caldwell's new black friend, called In Search of Bisco “a helluva good book, … possibly Mr. Caldwell's finest book.” In the Journal, Frank Daniel, Caldwell's old white friend, reminded readers that Caldwell had been exposing racial injustice for more than thirty years. “Few writers,” Daniel wrote, “have the authority and the power to speak now as he can here.”⁹²

In a letter to Caldwell written shortly before publication of the review, Daniel said: “You are writing better today than ever. Bisco says more and says it with more power than anything I've read on the subject. Its implications and reverberations are limitless.”⁹³ Daniel's admiration of his friend and his hope for the success of the civil rights movement caused him to overrate In Search of Bisco. The book lacks the power of Caldwell's great work of the 1930s. Even so, as Daniel rightly suggested, Bisco provides strong testimony of Caldwell's untiring quest to promote social justice.

Hard upon the publication of his treatment of race in the 1960s South, Caldwell undertook his publisher's third assignment, which entailed an examination of another subject that had long held his interest. Deep South: Memory and Observation assays the twentieth-century evolution of evangelical Protestantism in the region identified in the book's title. The author's method of juxtaposing memory and observation, of interlarding reminiscences of his father's ministry early in the century with assessments of religion in the 1960s, was rejected by the publisher, who insisted that he rewrite the manuscript to provide an expanded account of the 1960s only. His refusal to do so required that he seek another publisher.⁹⁴

Had Caldwell heeded the advice of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Deep South would have been a tighter—and weaker—book. The “memory” portions feature some of the most poignant writing that he ever produced, and they supply fitting touchstones for the “observation” segments. Comparing his memory of his father's experience with his own observation of southern religion in the 1960s, Caldwell concluded that within white Protestantism the social gospel had made little progress.⁹⁵

In less affluent churches, which were often located in small towns and rural areas, religion continued to be, as it had been in his father's time, narcotic, escapist, and sometimes salacious. Churches whose worship services resembled “night clubs and other places of theatrical entertainment” could hardly be expected to be seedbeds of social reform. Too often they were hothouses of reaction. The minister of one such church was an active supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. A member of a similar church, a storekeeper who described himself as “a good Christian” for “nearly forty-five years,” gave vent to repulsion sparked by a Jewish competitor who allowed black customers to try on clothes and who even helped them find shoes that fit. Such practices were outrageous to that good Christian. “I'll go bankrupt and get put out of business before you see me squatting down in front of a black nigger, lacing and unlacing shoes for him like he was a white man.”⁹⁶

Notwithstanding all of the fanaticism, religious and secular, displayed by members of fundamentalist churches in the countryside, Caldwell delivered his harshest judgment upon the affluent members of fashionable churches in the big cities of the South. Headed by slick preachers and slick officers, such congregations contained “the beautiful people of religion,” the upwardly mobile who embraced the church for the wrong reasons: getting ahead, meeting women, and going to their destination in eternity—be it heaven or hell—“de luxe” rather than “second class.” The “First Baptist” disease—a condition wherein boosterism triumphed over social conscience—was all too contagious.⁹⁷

To Caldwell, both sides, the complacently conservative and the fanatically fundamentalist, were badly flawed primarily because both opposed the cause of civil rights. The spokesmen of contemporary white Protestantism featured in Deep South stand in sorry contrast to his father, who had always advocated fair treatment of blacks and who had consistently denounced both the conspicuous display of wealthy urban churches and the wild emotionalism of poor rural ones.

If too many white churches were “devoted exclusively to the incestuous practice of religion for religion's sake,” hope lay in the fundamentalist yet socially conscious black churches that were the vanguard of the civil rights movement. In his truncated account of black Protestantism, added at the suggestion of his new publisher, Caldwell displayed only a sketchy knowledge of its historical development. Yet he understood well the importance of clergymen in the black community. Many black ministers reaching their prime in the 1950s and 1960s were educated men, “calm and capable in judgment,” who had the ability “to persuade the older generation to put aside its fear of the white man and at the same time restrain the younger generation from engaging in impetuous retaliatory acts.” To the greatest of these men, he had written earlier: “Of all contemporary Americans, you are the most deserving of … [the Nobel Peace Prize.] I am proud to be one of your fellow citizens.” Although he did not so stipulate in Deep South, it is apparent that Caldwell believed that black men such as Martin Luther King Jr.—enlightened, reasonable, committed to social Christianity—upheld the principles that his father had championed to a far greater degree than did most white ministers.⁹⁸

Because religion was not as timely a topic as race in the 1960s, Deep South received much less attention from southern reviewers than had In Search of Bisco. Among the southerners who noticed Deep South, one described it as “lackluster … dull and repetitious.” Another claimed that Caldwell intended “to downgrade the Christian faith and to group all Protestants as frenzied, foot-stomping zealots.” Much more perceptive was the review by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of the Greensboro Daily News. Although Yoder ignored Caldwell's savage indictment of the social irresponsibility of fashionable urban churches, he praised his treatment of “backwoods religion,” whose practitioners “are poor people who find refuge from the world's woes and threats in a vicious old God, white and Anglo-Saxon, who vouchsafes His hate of Negroes, Jews, and Catholics.” Further echoing Caldwell, Yoder noted that as white fundamentalism opposed change—“the sawdust aisle is the focus of Ku Klux orthodoxy,” he wrote—“black fundamentalism is far more interested … in questions of social justice.” Caldwell's insights, Yoder concluded, “are shrewd and ring of truth.”⁹⁹

Just as Caldwell had not divulged the danger that he occasionally faced in his trips across the South in the 1930s, so he refused to disclose his apprehension about the journeys of the 1960s. Fearing for his safety, his nonagenarian mother advised him not to undertake the investigations. Her son and his wife usually took the precaution of flying to a city near their destination and then renting an automobile for further travel. It was important, Erskine told Virginia, not to drive a car bearing license tags from outside the South. Once, when they drove their own car, a restaurant owner in Louisiana told them: “If you people from other places would stay out of the South, we wouldn't have any trouble.” On another occasion, when not in her husband's presence, Caldwell's wife, whose speech indicated that she was an outsider, was intimidated by lawmen in a Deep South town.¹⁰⁰

For all of his unease over his and Virginia's safety, Caldwell was gratified by the attention that his 1960s nonfiction, especially In Search of Bisco, received from southern reviewers, some of whom were sympathetic to his goals. Moreover, he knew that some of the South's educators had begun to notice and to applaud his work of the 1930s. The writer who had stood his ground for thirty years found that an articulate minority of southerners was ready to honor him. At long last, the changing South was trying to catch up to the unchanging writer.

Late in the 1950s and with increasing frequency throughout the following decade, colleges and universities, now aware in a socially conscious climate of Caldwell's lifelong interest in beneficent social change, led the way in bestowing accolades. Unknowingly following the lead of black Fisk University, which had invited Caldwell to attend special events in the 1940s, white institutions from Virginia to Texas solicited his presence, sometimes over the objections of alumni and other people. Despite his aversion to making speeches, he came, and he was always received graciously, sometimes enthusiastically. At the University of Georgia in 1958, he was lionized. At Erskine College the following year, a literary society that had existed for more than a century inducted him as its second honorary member—after Robert E. Lee. At the University of Virginia the next year, the prestigious Raven Society made him a member. That alma mater would honor him on a number of occasions later as well.¹⁰¹

Moved by the recognition accorded by academicians—and by journalists such as the influential Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution—Caldwell, while still harshly critical of the South's shortcomings, often expressed pride in his Georgia roots. “I … will always be a Georgian,” he told an Associated Press writer. “Nobody can take that away from me and I'm glad.” “I like to think,” he wrote to Georgia's governor, “that I am as much a Georgian as Baer Rabbit.” “Wherever I am,” he disclosed to a Miami editor, “I'm a Cracker and glad of it. I wouldn't want to have to live another life and be something else.”¹⁰²

In 1968, after ten years of growing approbation from some of his fellow southerners, the nomadic Caldwell, having lived in Maine, Connecticut, Arizona, and California, settled in the South—albeit on its periphery—for the first time in more than forty years. His new home on the Gulf Coast of central Florida, he said without irony, “is close enough to the old home of Georgia.”¹⁰³

The recognition by southerners would continue for the rest of Caldwell's life, prompting the New York Times to observe in 1978 that he had been “rehabilitated as a regional literary lion.” Colleges and universities continued to invite him to lecture and sought to obtain manuscripts and first editions. The University of Virginia honored him with a dinner on his seventy-fifth birthday. The University of Georgia and the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities produced films about his life and works. A southern publisher reissued some of the significant works of the 1930s. A fellow Georgian, President Jimmy Carter, whose candidacy Caldwell had warmly endorsed, wrote him a complimentary personal letter and also invited him to a White House reception. Towns in which he had lived as a boy sought his presence at centennial celebrations. Almost always, Caldwell accepted invitations and fulfilled requests. And he continued to write, producing two lackluster novels and an interesting travel book in the first half of the 1970s.¹⁰⁴

The social concern also continued unabated. His penultimate novel scores southern racism, and the portions of the travel account devoted to the South highlight the limits of material progress and the constricting nature of evangelical Protestantism. Soon after the publication of the travel book, Afternoons in Mid-America, Caldwell envisioned a photojournalistic portrayal of the Deep South, perhaps along the lines of You Have Seen Their Faces. He asked his old friend Frank Daniel to recommend a photographer “who is earnest and social-minded and ambitious and fairly young who would want to take pictures of people for fame & glory and not much money.” The project fell through, but the fact that Caldwell, pushing seventy-five, wanted to conduct it provides yet further evidence of his undying concern for the South's downtrodden.¹⁰⁵

Nine years after his return to the South, ill health forced Caldwell to move back to the West, to the dry climate of Arizona. Living quietly with Virginia in Scottsdale, he worked on his final book. In 1983, after almost four years' labor, he completed the manuscript, an autobiography entitled “With All My Might.” Then, for the next two years, he and Virginia traveled occasionally—to France, to Italy, to Switzerland, to Bulgaria, and to various places in the United States. They took many of the trips to receive awards that had been bestowed on him. Despite the honors, he found that major American publishers were reluctant to issue his autobiography. Finally, in October 1986, a French house published the book.¹⁰⁶

By that time, Caldwell was seriously ill. Back in August, doctors had discovered that he suffered again from lung cancer. This strain was much more virulent than the kind that years before had forced surgeons to remove half of each of his lungs. For eight months, he fought the devastating disease. An oxygen tank with a fifty-foot line attached to it allowed him to breath and to move about his house. He endured the ravages of chemotherapy for six months, until his body no longer could tolerate the treatments. He steadfastly refused medicine that would have eased his pain and would have helped him sleep. Throughout the ordeal, he never lost his sense of humor. Playfully, he suggested that his ashes be buried on a dead-end street. The night before he died, as his condition deteriorated rapidly, he asked a visiting neighbor, who was a physician, how much he charged for house calls. The end came on April 11, 1987.¹⁰⁷

A month before Caldwell's death, an American publisher, at long last, issued With All My Might. It is supremely fitting that his farewell was published by a press in his native Georgia, a place that had supplied such rich material about the poor people whose lives he had strived to improve.¹⁰⁸

Notes

1. The trip began in October and ended in December; Caldwell, Call It Experience, 192. The two other collaborations were North of the Danube (New York: Viking, 1939) and Russia at War (London: Hutchinson, 1942).

2. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Say, Is This the U.S.A., 138, 146, 154-56.

3. Thad Snow to EC, 12 Feb. 1941; George Wolf to EC, 14 Feb. 1941, ECC-DC; Erskine Caldwell, “Flight from the Land,” 20-22, 92.

4. Ethridge, Caldwell, and Graves, “Are We a United People?” 3-30, esp. 4-5, ECC-DC.

5. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 22-23; Ethridge, Caldwell, and Graves, “Are We a United People?,” 5-11, ECC-DC.

6. Birmingham News, 21 Feb. 1941, EC Scrapbooks, reel 2; Ethridge, Caldwell, and Graves, “Are We a United People?” 11-15, ECC-DC.

7. Ethridge, Caldwell, and Graves, “Are We a United People?” 16-19, ECC-DC.

8. Ibid., 21; Birmingham News, 21 Feb. 1941, EC Scrapbooks, reel 2.

9. Charles A. Pearce to Lucy Bailey, 17 Mar. 1947, ECC-DC; EC to Hamilton Basso, 19 Aug. 1940, Caldwell Correspondence, Yale University; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 219; Miller, “Tracing Tobacco Road,” 445-48.

10. Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 176, 224-25; EC to Kenneth and Genevieve [Taggard], 22 Nov. 1939, Genevieve Taggard Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Ashland (Ky.) Independent, 19 Apr. 1940, EC Scrapbooks, reel 2; EC to Mr. and Mrs. I. S. Caldwell, 16 Dec. 1939, ECC-UGA.

11. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 185; Earl L. Bell to EC, 15 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1939; EC to Earl Bell, 17 Dec. 1939, Caldwell Papers, Syracuse University.

12. [Erskine Caldwell], Prospectus for American Folkways: A Series, undated, ECC-DC. See also St. Paul Dispatch, 23 May 1941, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3.

13. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 20 Aug. 1950, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4; Ashland (Ky.) Independent, 19 Apr. 1940; Hot Springs (Ark.) New Era, 23 Oct. 1940, EC Scrapbooks, reel 2; Jacksonville Times-Union, 13 July 1941, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3.

14. Jacksonville Times-Union, 13 July 1941; Miami Herald, 25 Apr. 1943, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3; EC to Stetson Kennedy, 25 Aug. 1940, ECC-UGA.

15. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 5 Sept. 1940 and 7 and 8 Jan. 1941, ECC-UGA.

16. Stetson Kennedy to EC, 3 Mar. 1941, ECC-DC; EC to Stetson Kennedy, 12 June [1941], ECC-UGA. [Stetson Kennedy], “Prospectus” [for American Folkways], 5 June 1941. I am grateful to Mr. Kennedy for supplying a copy of this document.

17. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 28 Nov. 1941, ECC-UGA; Martin, Howard Kester, 72-73; Stetson Kennedy, Palmetto Country, 201-11.

18. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 18 Dec. 1941, ECC-UGA; Kennedy, Palmetto Country, 183-91, esp. 184, 191.

19. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 18 Dec. 1941 and 25 Jan. and 22 May 1942, ECC-UGA.

20. Kennedy, Palmetto Country, 193-200, esp. 193-96.

21. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 5 Mar. 1942, ECC-UGA; Kennedy, Palmetto Country, 43-107.

22. EC to Stetson Kennedy, 22 May 1942, ECC-UGA; John Selby, “Books and Things,” Mankato (Minn.) Free Press, 21 Dec. 1942, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3.

23. Arnold, “Interview with Erskine Caldwell,” in Arnold, Conversations, 286; EC to Hamilton Basso, 19 Aug. 1940, Caldwell Correspondence, Yale University.

24. EC to Rhoda Lynn, 28 Mar. 1941, ECC-DC; EC to Stetson Kennedy, 12 June [1941], ECC-UGA.

25. Stetson Kennedy to EC, 13 Oct. 1946; Charles Duell to EC, 16 Mar. 1942, quoting George Milburn; MacEdward Leach to EC, 19 Mar. 1945, ECC-DC.

26. Klevar, “Erskine Caldwell,” draft of Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 312, 375, 382, 413, 435.

27. Bonetti, “A Good Listener Speaks,” in Arnold, Conversations, 244-51, esp. 250; Caldwell and Bourke-White, Russia at War; Erskine Caldwell, Moscow Under Fire: A Wartime Diary, 1941 (London: Hutchinson, 1942); Erskine Caldwell, All-Out on the Road to Smolensk (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942); Erskine Caldwell, All Night Long: A Novel of Guerrilla Warfare in Russia (New York: Book League of America, 1942).

28. Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 239; Caldwell, Call It Experience, 204, 217.

29. Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 199, 219, 222-23, 252-53.

30. Ibid., 252-53; Miller, “Tracing Tobacco Road,” 511; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 247-53.

31. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 217; Erskine Caldwell, Georgia Boy.

32. Caldwell, Georgia Boy, 193-205, 57-66, 69-83, 117-33.

33. Ibid., 227-39; EC to Charles A. Pearce, 8 Dec. [1942], ECC-DC.

34. EC to Charles A. Pearce, 8 Dec. [1942], ECC-DC; Caldwell, Georgia Boy, jacket blurb for 1950 reprint.

35. Caldwell, Georgia Boy, jacket blurb for 1950 reprint; Houston Post, 25 Apr. 1943; Dallas News, 2 May 1943; Montgomery Advertiser, 23 May 1943; Chattanooga Times, 13 June 1943, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3.

36. Houston Post, 25 Apr. 1943; Montgomery Advertiser, 23 May 1943, EC Scrapbooks, reel 3; Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer-Sun, 9 May 1943, Erskine Caldwell Collection, University of Virginia.

37. Erskine Caldwell, Tragic Ground, 74, 127.

38. Ibid., 7, 15, 26, 42, 56, 58, 79, 114, 124, 128.

39. Ibid., 66, 95.

40. Ibid., 94, 95, 121, 126.

41. Ibid., 96, 128.

42. For the impact of the Second World War on the South's economy, see Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 694-701.

43. Ibid., 703.

44. Charlotte News, 20 Oct. 1944; Louisville Courier-Journal, 12 Nov. 1944; Saturday Review of Literature, 14 Oct. 1944, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4. See also Montgomery Advertiser, 5 Nov. 1944; Winston-Salem Sentinel, 12 Nov. 1944; and Raleigh News and Observer, 10 Dec. 1944, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

45. EC to Alfred Morang, 5 and 23 Oct. 1944, Morang Papers.

46. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 222; EC to James Gray, 11 Sept. 1948, Papers of James Gray and Family, Minnesota Historical Society.

47. Erskine Caldwell, A House in the Uplands.

48. Ibid., 27, 11-12.

49. Erskine Caldwell, The Sure Hand of God.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 163.

52. Erskine Caldwell, This Very Earth, 63.

53. Erskine Caldwell, Place Called Estherville.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 231-32.

56. Ibid., 234-44.

57. Erskine Caldwell, Episode in Palmetto.

58. Philip Lightfoot Scruggs, “A Southern Miscellany: Crusaders and Artists,” Virginia Quarterly Review 21 (Summer 1946): 449 (quotation); Savannah Morning News, 14 Apr. 1946; Memphis Commercial Appeal, 28 Apr. 1946; Charleston News and Courier, 5 May 1946; Dallas News, 5 May 1946 and 25 Sept. 1949; Athens (Ga.) Banner Herald, 27 Oct. 1947; Charlotte Observer, 16 Nov. 1947; Louisville Courier-Journal, 23 Nov. 1947; Lynchburg (Va.) Advance, 26 Aug. 1948; Atlanta Constitution, 29 Aug. 1948 and 4 Sept. 1949; Greensboro Daily News, 29 Aug. 1948; Atlanta Journal, 11 Sept. 1949; Birmingham News, 17 Sept. 1949; Augusta Herald, 29 Sept. 1949; Winston-Salem Journal, 24 Oct. 1949, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4. For favorable reviews, see Atlanta Journal, 12 Oct. 1947 and 18 Aug. 1948; Houston Post, 19 Oct. 1947; Anderson (S.C.) Daily Mail, 27 Oct. 1947; Phylon (First Quarter 1949), EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

59. Atlanta Journal, 11 Sept. 1949; Dallas News, 25 Sept. 1949; Augusta Herald, 29 Sept. 1949, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

60. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 5.

61. Erskine Caldwell, Gulf Coast Stories; Erskine Caldwell, “The Story of Mahlon,” Erskine Caldwell, When You Think of Me, 30-38, esp. 33, 38. Devlin, Erskine Caldwell, 115, conjectures that the “melancholy impressionistic style” of “The Story of Mahlon” is evidence that Caldwell wrote the story “very early” in his career. Whenever the story might have been written, what is certain is that Caldwell allowed it to be published late in his career.

62. Erskine Caldwell, Jenny by Nature; Erskine Caldwell, Close to Home; Erskine Caldwell, The Last Night of Summer; Erskine Caldwell, Miss Mamma Aimee; Erskine Caldwell, Summertime Island; Erskine Caldwell, The Earnshaw Neighborhood; Erskine Caldwell, Annette.

63. Erskine Caldwell, Claudelle Inglish; Erskine Caldwell, The Weather Shelter; Caldwell, Jenny by Nature; Caldwell, Close to Home; Caldwell, Summertime Island.

64. Caldwell, Claudelle Inglish.

65. Miller, “Tracing Tobacco Road,” 545, 549-50; Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 10. Collectively, Caldwell's publishers received more than $6 million from the sale of his books during this period. His share from the sale of each twenty-five-cent book was usually one and a half cents.

66. Shaplen, “The Quarter Books,” 4, quoting Caldwell. Donald Demarest to Jerry Burke, 5 Nov. 1948; Donald Demarest to EC, 19 Aug. and 30 Dec. 1949; “Self-Interview by Erskine Caldwell,” [summer 1950], ECC-DC.

67. Caldwell, Call It Experience, 225-27; Caldwell, With All My Might, 211-13. “Famous Author at Katz,” unidentified, undated clipping; Kansas City Star, 24 June 1948; Kansas Writers' Conference: University of Kansas, 21 June to 2 July 1948 (brochure); Margaret Young, “Enterprise Book Corner,” Beaumont (Tex.) Enterprise, 4 July 1948; Margaret Young, “Writers Conference Gets Acescent Report,” Dallas Morning News, 18 July 1948, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

68. Weybright, “Georgia Boy,” 120.

69. A. D. Kirby to EC, 6 Dec. 1947; Mrs. Russell Taylor to EC, [1947]; Anna Smith to EC, [postmarked 25 May 1951]; “A Sophomore” to EC, [postmarked 25 May 1951]; Estelle Holleran to EC, 25 May 1951; Barbara Linan to EC, 24 May 1951, ECC-DC.

70. In addition to the correspondence cited in note 69, see Mabel D. Tillman to Editor, The Journal, Atlanta Journal, 25 June 1948; Eugene Anderson, “Around the Circle,” Macon Telegraph, 30 July 1949, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4; anonymous writer to New American Library, 13 Apr. 1949; Theresa Winchester to EC, 25 May 1951; William Wilson to EC, [1951?], ECC-DC.

71. Larry W. King to EC, 28 Feb. 1954; B. W. Middlebrook to EC, 18 June 1959; Mary J. Jones to EC, 8 Feb. 1952; “An American” to EC, 9 Mar. 1952, ECC-DC; Albany (Ga.) Herald, 16 June 1948, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

72. Jacksonville Times-Union, 31 Oct. 1959, EC Scrapbooks, reel 5; Theodore Waller to Charles Duell, 8, 15, and 22 June 1953, ECC-DC; Atlanta Journal, 21 Sept. 1957, EC Scrapbooks, reel 5; Victor Weybright to EC, 3 Oct. 1957, ECC-DC; Augusta Chronicle, 27 July 1957, quoting G. Pierce King, EC Scrapbooks, reel 5; Howard, “Caldwell on Stage and Screen,” 67-70; Caldwell, With All My Might, 255-56.

73. James Stokely to EC, 23 Feb. 1938; Charles A. Bly Jr. to EC and Margaret Bourke-White, 11 Apr. 1938; Tom P. Moye to EC, 23 Oct. 1938; Lorena Lester to EC, 15 Oct. 1940, ECC-DC.

74. Walter B. Powell to EC, 6 Feb. 1952; Bert H. Hatch to EC, 1 Nov. 1950; Gloucester Caliman Coxe to EC, 27 Nov. [1950?], ECC-DC. See also William W. Seward Jr. to EC, 25 Sept. 1948; Donald Demarest to Jerry Burke, 5 Nov. 1948; Cena B. Howard to EC, 15 Feb. 1950; Raymond G. Perkinson to EC, 29 Nov. 1952; Mrs. Fred Powell to EC, 14 Mar. 1958, ECC-DC; Albert E. Idell to Editor, Saturday Review of Literature, 29 June 1946, EC Scrapbooks, reel 4.

75. James F. Mitchell to EC, 29 Nov. 1947, ECC-DC; John O. West to Wayne Mixon, 27 Jan. and 9 Feb. 1991, letters in my possession.

76. “Hillbilly Peyton Place,” Time 70 (30 Sept. 1957): 102, EC Scrapbooks, reel 5.

77. James Oliver Brown to EC, 30 Apr. 1952, ECC-DC; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 298-99; Snyder, “Spying on Southerners,” 275-77. See also Firing Line 4 (15 May 1955): [49]-51. Firing Line was the organ of the American Legion's National Americanism Commission.

78. James Oliver Brown to EC, 5 May 1952; EC to June Caldwell, [June 1952], ECC-DC; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 307.

79. Klevar, “Erskine Caldwell,” draft of Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 350-52, 362, 369-70, 383, 402, 414, 424, 426, 428, 439, 451.

80. After 1959, Caldwell published no new short stories except for The Deer at Our House (New York: Collier, 1966), an illustrated children's story issued in book form. MacDonald, “Evaluative Check-List,” in MacDonald, Critical Essays, 357-59.

81. Harvey L. Klevar, interview with Erskine Caldwell, 30 Nov. 1978, quoted in Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 151-52; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 375-76.

82. Ibid., 364, 374.

83. Erskine Caldwell, Around About America, 41, 44-45.

84. Caldwell quoted in Los Angeles Mirror, 17 Jan. 1961, EC Scrapbooks, reel 5; Caldwell, Around About America, 63-64, 221.

85. Caldwell, Around About America, 54-59.

86. In With All My Might, written when he was nearly eighty, Caldwell asserted that he knew Bisco in White Oak, Georgia. When his family left White Oak, Caldwell was only three years old. Doubtlessly Caldwell knew Bisco, but the acquaintance probably was made while the Caldwells were living in Prosperity, South Carolina. By the time the family left Prosperity, Erskine was nearly nine. Caldwell, With All My Might, 4-6.

87. Caldwell, In Search of Bisco, 49-58, 71-82, 86-87, 109, 112.

88. Ibid., 170-71.

89. Ibid., 123-28, 156-64.

90. Ibid., 213-14.

91. Austin American-Statesman, 11 Apr. 1965; Pensacola News Journal, 9 May 1965; Charleston News and Courier, 18 Apr. 1965, ECC-DC. See also Charlotte Observer, 4 Apr. 1965; New Orleans Picayune, [?] May 1965; Louisville Courier-Journal, [?] July 1965, ECC-DC.

92. Nashville Banner, 30 Apr. 1965; Dallas News, 4 Apr. 1965; Norfolk Pilot, 11 Apr. 1965; High Point (N.C.) Enterprise, 4 Apr. 1965; Rocky Mount (N.C.) Telegram, 18 Apr. 1965; Winston-Salem Journal-Sentinel, 18 Apr. 1965; Atlanta Daily World, 20 May 1965; Atlanta Journal, 11 Apr. 1965, ECC-DC. See also Birmingham News, 4 Apr. 1965; Nashville Tennesseean, 18 Apr. 1965; Houston Chronicle, 30 May 1965; Chattanooga Times, undated clipping, ECC-DC.

93. Frank Daniel to Virginia and Erskine Caldwell, 22 Mar. 1965, ECC-DC.

94. Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 381-82.

95. Caldwell, Deep South. Deep South is divided into two parts. The first section, which comprises 187 of the volume's 257 pages, was first published in England in 1966 as a book entitled In the Shadow of the Steeple. The second section, “At the Other End of Town,” was original to Deep South.

96. Ibid., 53, 147, 149.

97. Ibid., 127.

98. Ibid., 250, 247; Klevar, “Erskine Caldwell,” draft of Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 521; EC to Martin Luther King Jr., 11 Nov. 1964, quoted in Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 377.

99. San Antonio Express, 10 Mar. 1968; Atlanta Constitution and Journal, 25 Feb. 1968, ECC-DC; Edwin M. Yoder Jr., “Are Pianos Holier than Pipe Organs?” Chicago Tribune Book World, 19 Mar. 1968, ECC-UGA.

100. Interview with Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, 2 July 1992.

101. A. A. Taylor to Mr. and Mrs. Erskine Caldwell, 13 Jan. 1947; Invitation from Fisk University [to Mr. and Mrs. Erskine Caldwell] to attend openings of collections at Fisk's Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts on 4 November 1949; Virginia Caldwell to James Oliver Brown, 5 Aug. 1958; Phillip J. Walker to EC, 7 Dec. 1959 and 21 Apr. 1960, ECC-DC; interview with Ralph Stephens; John D. Smith, “Recollections of the Events Surrounding Erskine Caldwell's Visit to Erskine College in December 1959,” 3 Nov. 1970. As president of Erskine College's Euphemian Literary Society, Smith, a native of Atoka, Tennessee, and a member of Salem Church many years after Ira Caldwell had served as pastor, was the target of protests from Erskine College alumni and other people who opposed Caldwell's visit. I am grateful to Mr. Smith for supplying a copy of his “Recollections.” See also John Cook Wyllie to EC, 8 Sept. 1962; W. G. Malcolm to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., undated, enclosed with Janet L. Sketchley to EC, 21 Apr. 1965, ECC-DC.

102. Ralph McGill, “Tobacco Road Is Now Paved,” Atlanta Constitution, 19 Nov. 1966; Ralph McGill, “The Culture of Poverty,” Atlanta Constitution, 7 Dec. 1966; EC to Ralph McGill, 9 and 22 Dec. 1966, Ralph McGill Papers, Special Collections, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University; EC to Chris Eckl, 24 July 1965; EC to Governor [Lester] Maddox, 24 Oct. 1967; EC to John Pennekamp, 28 Mar. 1969, ECC-DC. For further evidence of recognition of Caldwell by southern academicians, see Gerald M. Garmon to EC, 8 Jan. and 13 May 1964; Samuel R. Spencer Jr. to EC, 14 Sept. 1964 and 19 Mar. and 8 and 16 Apr. 1965; Charles N. Carnes to Mr. and Mrs. Erskine Caldwell, 25 Feb. 1966, ECC-DC; Emory University Campus Report 17 (1 Feb. 1965): 1, Daniel Papers.

103. EC to John Pennekamp, 28 Mar. 1969, ECC-DC.

104. New York Times, 18 Dec. 1978; Virginia Caldwell to Mills Lane IV, 4 Nov. 1976; Virginia Caldwell to Cornelia and Waller Barrett, 4 Dec. 1976 and 3 Dec. 1978, Erskine Caldwell Collection, University of Virginia; Mills Lane IV to EC, 25 Mar. and 3 June 1975, ECC-DC; Thomas with Eidsvik, producers, In Search of Caldwell's Georgia; Moser, producer, Erskine Caldwell; interview with Mary M. Maner, 25 May 1990.

105. Caldwell, Earnshaw Neighborhood; Erskine Caldwell, Afternoons in Mid-America, 13-69; EC to Frank Daniel, 10 Feb. and 27 Mar. 1977, ECC-UGA.

106. Arnold, “Interview with Virginia Caldwell,” in Arnold, Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered, 104, 106; Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 409-10.

107. Klevar, Erskine Caldwell, 414; Arnold, “Interview with Virginia Caldwell,” in Arnold, Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered, 106-8.

108. With All My Might was issued by Peachtree Publishers of Atlanta in March 1987. Telephone conversation with Kathleen Herndon of Peachtree Publishers, 12 Feb. 1993.