[The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell] is, of course, the definitive collection of all the short stories written by Erskine Caldwell—ninety-six of them. Here are the familiar ones and those less familiar, the short ones and the long. Here are those which have been dramatized time and again (although perhaps never so thoroughly as Mr. Caldwell's Tobacco Road ) and those which were born to blush practically unseen in now departed little magazines.

As the pages turn—and a lot of pages there indeed are—Mr. Caldwell roams through a writer's moods. He appreciates, as only an observant Southern visitor could, the niceties of the New England character. About New England, he is mainly sunny. But he appreciates, too, as an observant Southerner, that there are many things about share-cropping and poverty that are far from sunny.

Some of the stories are brief character sketches, almost plotless and resembling notes set down in a day book. Some find Mr. Caldwell in sympathetic laughter. But there are others, a great many others, where he is far from genial, where the words on the page and the incidents described are calculated to stand the hair on end. So here they are, all kinds, the life-time short story output of Erskine Caldwell.

The lifetime output? Not quite. The published output. For like many another, Mr. Caldwell had his troubles before getting the ninety-six.

"I've always been writing stories," he said the other day. "Probably I started when I was about 8. But I had the longest period of wastebasket days on record.

"For years I kept the rejection slips. Then, when the first one sold—early in the Thirties—I had a huge bonfire of the slips. It made a fine private celebration."

Which stories, of the ninety-six, most appealed to the man in position to know them best? Mr. Caldwell stirred uneasily.

"Me," he said, "I like 'em all. But if I had to pick, maybe 'Country Full of Swedes,' maybe 'The Windfall.' If I had to narrow it down, perhaps 'Horse Thief should go in, and 'Yellow Girl,' and if it's to be five, 'Kneel To the Rising Sun.'"

The case of Mr. Caldwell's favorite, "Country Full of Swedes"—it is about New England—furnishes an excellent example of the path which leads from a private bonfire to the lead-off position in an anthology.

"I moved to Maine in '29," he said. "Having lived in the South all my life, I wanted to get as far away as I could, and still stay in the country. A lot of writers were going to Europe then, but I went to Maine. I wanted to see the contrast.

"A mixture of nationalities was new to me, and I suppose that gave me the idea. I wrote the story early in the Thirties, and tried to sell it for over a year.

"It was turned down by sixteen or eighteen magazines. Editors just didn't turn it down, but would write and say why. One of them, a good one, too, said to forget the whole thing. Then it went to The Yale Review, which took it right away. In addition, they gave it a $1,000 prize. That was a lot of money then. Still is."

Although only fifth on Mr. Caldwell's list, "Kneel to the Rising Sun" is one of the most familiar of the stories. This is about the South and the killing of a Negro who talked back.

"'Kneel' was the culmination of a lot of things," Mr. Caldwell said. "As a boy I lived a long while in the sharecropper country and it made a great impression on me. Summers I picked cotton and hired out as a farmhand and so saw the whole thing.

"After leaving the South I had the story in mind for about five years. I was living in New York in a $3 basement room when I went to work on it. It didn't take long to write.

"I sent it to Scribner's magazine. Max Perkins wanted to publish it but couldn't persuade the others. Scribner's sent it back. Then a month later Max wrote that he couldn't get it out of his mind, and to return it. He put it in the next issue."

Mr. Caldwell is a tall man, just this side of 50, with a crew cut, an Arizona tan and a once broken nose. This broken nose came about when he once played semi-pro football in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.

"I'd been working in Philadelphia in an orange-drink stand," he said. "Came the fall and a night shift in an open stand and I almost froze. Having lived in the South, my blood was pretty thin. I had to get out of there, and the only job I could find was as stock boy in Kresge's in Wilkes-Barre. Another boy there got me into football—Wilkes-Barre in the Anthracite league. The salaries weren't great."

His wanderings are a little hard to follow, although there is a rhythm about them and a purpose beyond the Arizona tan.

"I left the South at 21, when I'd finished preliminary education. Then there were eight years in Maine, a few in New York, some in Connecticut and eight in Tucson. I make it a practice never to live anywhere more than eight years, so I recently rented a studio in Phoenix. Only 125 miles away, but a move."

Author of a dozen novels and other matters besides the ninety-six stories, Mr. Caldwell never mixes them up. This is the year for working on a novel (title undetermined, but about life in the United States), while next year may be one for stories. It was from one of the novels that Broadway and the rest of the civilized world received Tobacco Road, which ran for interminable centuries.

"I don't consider myself part of it," Mr. Caldwell said. "Someone else did the dramatization, not me. But I tried to go at least once a year. I wanted to see what they were up to, that year."