[Bode was an American critic, educator, and poet. In the excerpt below, he disparages Caldwell's artistry generally but judges his short stories superior to his novels: "the sagging architecture which weakens all his novels does not develop in the short stories. They are better for being brief."]

God's little Acre and the rest of Caldwell's hot and shoddy novels make much money for him but add nothing to his literary reputation. This is not true for his short stories. The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1953) gives us a chance to see him to better advantage.

Most of these tales are set, as one might expect, in the same South as God's little Acre. A few of the remainder are set in New England, where Caldwell spent several early years trying to sell what he wrote. The rest of the stories are unlocalized. The Southwest—he now lives in Arizona—furnishes him with no material at all. His characters in these narratives are rarely individual. The poor whites act much alike. Although some of his stories of social injustice are as moving as anything he has ever written, it is hard to tell one suffering Negro from another. If we had to fix the time within which these beaten-down white and colored sharecroppers move, it would apparently be the depth of the Great Depression. Caldwell has selected the period, as he has selected the place, which offers him the best chance for grimy melodrama. The pressures of poverty and exploitation weigh on his people. Actually, the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar boom in the South have all come to relieve those pressures, but Caldwell wisely continues to ignore this fact.

When he abandons his picturing of the impoverished South, his writing nearly always suffers. His conclusion to "The lonely Day," for example, the story of a Maine farm girl, is pure mawkishness. "The first light of day broke through the mists and found her lying in the road, her body made lifeless by an automobile that had shot through the darkness an hour before. She was without motion, but she was naked, and a smile that was the beginning of laughter made her the most beautiful woman that tourists speeding to the Provinces had ever seen." When he tries to philosophize about life for the women's magazine market, he sounds just as false, though in a different way. In "Here and Today," first printed in Harper's Bazaar, he takes up the problem of the eternal triangle. The solution he recommends pontifically is that the woman who wants to keep her husband must make herself more alluring than the other woman. Says the heroine to her wandering husband, "I've been fighting you all this time, trying to take you from her and bring you back to me. I know now that it is up to me to make you think I'm the most attractive." With Olympian wisdom, the husband agrees.

Half a dozen writers in the prizewinning short story annuals, almost any year, write better than Caldwell. Yet he has achieved some reputation and he once won a literary prize himself. The kind words he has received are not always justified. He has the ability to put vivid sense impressions into simple words, the ability .. . to keep the action moving, and finally—in his short stories at any rate—the ability to stop before the reader has caught up with him. A fair share of his short stories are memorable ones, although that is partly the result of his matter rather than his manner. Even his crudely constructed stories linger in our mind when they are tragic enough, though a visit to the morgue will too. In general, however, the sagging architecture which weakens all his novels does not develop in the short stories. They are the better for being brief.

One other factor in Caldwell's favor should be mentioned. It appears so obvious that it is sometimes taken for granted yet should not be. It is his literary vitality, his ability to keep on writing nowadays at about the same level he reached two decades ago. More than one able writer has drained his imagination and thereafter has either written less or written aridly, but not Caldwell.

Among the collected stories, "Candy-Man Beechum" clearly proves Caldwell's power to portray pathos and dignity; this is a sharper, keener story than the better known "Kneel to the Rising Sun." "The Medicine Man" is a first-rate sample of what some people have called his Rabelaisian humor, although it is really pornography with a horse laugh. And "Evelyn and the Rest of Us" compresses into three pages the whole story of the loss of childhood innocence. Nor are these stories the only excellent ones.

There is a place in the world of literature between William Faulkner and les Scott. Mythologist of the South and holder of the Nobel award for literature, Faulkner is a great novelist. les Scott, whose works attracted the animated attention of Congress's Gathings committee of several years ago, is well represented by such a labor of commercial Love as his novel She Made It Pay. Between these two men Erskine Caldwell can be set.