Book Description
Author of such classics of 20th-century popular American literature as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell was something of a celebrity nearly all his life. But he was also a serious writer, one whose merits are as considerable as they remain underexplored. In the 1930s, he startled the literary world with his frank portrayals of the poor whites of the South. Beginning in the early 1940s, critics grew suspicious that he had exhausted his originality and his talent. In the late 1960s, some scholars began an effort, which continues intermittently today, to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. This collection of reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts provides a chronological portrait of the often contradictory and unfailingly colorful critical response to Caldwell from 1931 to the present.


About the Author
ROBERT L. McDONALD is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at the Virginia Military Institute.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Author of such classics of 20th-century popular American literature as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell was something of a celebrity nearly all his life. But he was also a serious writer, one whose merits are as considerable as they remain underexplored. In the 1930s, he startled the literary world with his frank portrayals of the poor whites of the South. Beginning in the early 1940s, critics grew suspicious that he had exhausted his originality and his talent. In the late 1960s, some scholars began an effort, which continues intermittently today, to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. This collection of reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts provides a chronological portrait of the often contradictory and unfailingly colorful critical response to Caldwell from 1931 to the present.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ed Piacentino - Mississippi Quarterly

[The book] has much to commend it....in the final analysis, the primary value...may lie in ...the "reconsiderations" section, if, for no other reason, than helping to eradicate some of the long-standing misperceptions about Erskine Caldwell's work.

Booknews

A collection of articles by American reviewers and literary critics documenting the critical response to the work of Erskine Caldwell, illustrating the shifting attitudes to his fiction over the course of his career. Book reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts are arranged chronologically. An introduction offers a brief history of the critical response.

Ed Piacentino