Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell 1938, photo by Carl van Vechten

Erskine Preston Caldwell (born December 17, 1903 in Moreland , Georgia , † April 11, 1987 in Paradise Valley , Arizona ) was an American writer .

Caldwell's early work in particular is considered to be of literary significance. Long runs scored God's Little Acre ( God's little acre ) and the Tobacco Road ( Tobacco Road ). The latter novel is grotesquely tragic about the life of a completely impoverished tenant family in the US state of Georgia during the worst phase of the Great Depression , the severe economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. Tobacco Street , whose literary value was controversial at the time of its publication, is now counted among the most important novels of the 20th century. The Modern Library included the novel in its list of the 100 Most Important American Novels of the 20th Century. In 2009 the British newspaper The Guardian counted the novel among the 1000 novels that everyone must have read, and Joachim Kaiser also lists the novel among the 1000 most important works in literary history .

Life

Erskine Caldwell Born is the only son of Caroline Preston ( Carrie ) Bell, a school teacher, and Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a Presbyterian clergyman. Due to the father's work obligations, the family lived in various regions of the southern United States during Caldwell's childhood. It was not until the summer of 1919 that they finally settled in the US state of Georgia, in the small town of Wrens in Jefferson County .

After graduating from high school, Caldwell first attended Erskine College, a private Christian college in South Carolina and then the University of Virginia , but without taking an exam. At the University of Virginia, however, he was encouraged by one of his professors to try his hand at writing. At the University of Virginia he also met his future wife Helen Lannigan. They married in 1925 and had three children. The couple separated in 1938 after 13 years of marriage.

Caldwell worked in a variety of professions including farmhand, newspaper correspondent, construction and stage worker, cook and book critic before his first stories were accepted for print. His first printed publication appeared in 1926 while he was still a student at the University of Virginia. In the essay he already addressed topics that also dominate his later novels and short stories: racist injustice, political demagogy, excessive religiosity, and social neglect. Erskine Caldwell was confronted with poverty in the US state of Georgia as a young man. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, was a Presbyterian pastor who was interested in social issues and often took his son with him when visiting the poorest parishioners around the city of Wrens, Jefferson County . Erskine Caldwell's concern for their poor living conditions was as genuine as his indignation at the causes that led to their desperate living conditions. Caldwell therefore understood his novels and short stories as a form of social protest. At the same time, however, he refused to romanticize the poverty he had experienced or to give his characters an inherent dignity.

In 1942 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

The Tobacco Street

Great notoriety gained Caldwell particularly with his novel Tobacco Road (dt. The Tobacco Road ), which deals with the hard life of sharecroppers in his native Georgia. Maxwell Perkins , one of the most important editors in American literary history, oversaw the publication of the novel at Scribner's in 1932 . F. Scott Fitzgerald , who was also one of the Perkins supervised authors, had previously drawn Perkins' attention to the short stories of Caldwell. As early as 1931, Scribner's had published Caldwell's first major work, American Earth . In this collection of short stories, Caldwell already addressed the brutal effects of poverty and, among other things, describes lynching .

Tobacco Street is a grotesquely tragic story of the life of an impoverished tenant family in the US state of Georgia during the worst phase of the Great Depression , the severe economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. The poverty of the family is so great that their life is dominated only by the fulfillment of the most basic needs: the satisfaction of their hunger and their sexual desire. In a review eighty years after the novel was first published, the critic Nathaniel Rich wrote that the novel still had the quality of a freak show : as a comedy-moderate and as a tragedy completely failing, it confronts the reader in a brutal way with losers in American society, who no longer have any dignity. This distinguishes this novel from the novels of John Steinbeck , Carson McCuller or Eudora Welty , which also depict failures, but still give these failures an inner dignity.

A theatrical adaptation of this novel by Jack Kirkland became one of the longest-running programs in Broadway history . In Chicago, on the other hand, the mayor of the city, Edward F. Kelly, had the stage version banned in 1934 due to the profanity shown. The theater producers successfully sued this performance ban. There were similar attempts to ban performance in other cities. Caldwell himself vigorously defended both the stage version and his novel, and in this context became one of the main advocates for artistic freedom. 1940 Darryl F. Zanuck and the film studio Twentieth Century Fox acquired the film rights to the novel. Twentieth Century Fox had just successfully filmed John Steinbeck's socially critical novel The Fruits of Wrath . Both John Ford , who directed The Fruits of Wrath , and the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson wanted to preserve the socially critical aspects of Caldwell's novel, but they were overruled by the film studio and had to choose a different ending for the film. All in all, these interventions led to the film of the same name becoming a sentimental burlesque that was rejected by Caldwell.

God's little field

In his other books and short stories, Caldwell also wrote primarily about the life of the poorest white people in the American southern states . His most successful novel was God's Little Acre (dt. God's Little Acre ), which was published in 1933 by Viking Press. Caldwell addresses the living conditions of the workers in the cotton mills, who try in vain to improve their working conditions by founding unions. God's Little Field is one of the best-selling books of all time with over 14 million copies sold and has been translated into more than forty languages. The fact that the front pages of the paperback editions that appeared after the Second World War featured scantily clad women who suggested that sex was the primary subject of his novels contributed significantly to the sales success. From the sale of his early works alone, Caldwell earned more than $ 200,000 in income between 1945 and 1951. Similar to Tobacco Road , God's Little Field also contains explicitly sexual scenes. In April 1933, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice indicted both Caldwell and Viking Press for spreading pornography . More than sixty authors, editors and literary critics support Caldwell and his publisher. Indeed, Judge Benjamin Greenspan dismissed the lawsuit. The decision is still considered essential to the principle that Amendment 1 to the United States Constitution also covers artistic freedom of expression.

In the 1930s, Caldwell ran a bookstore with his wife Helen; from 1939 to 1942 he was married to the photographer Margaret Bourke-White , with whom he had published the documentary photo book You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937. Similar to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this illustrated book documents the hard life of impoverished southerners. After separating from Margaret Bourke-White, Caldwell married June Johnson, who was only half his age and who was still studying at the time of the marriage. The marriage lasted over twelve years. A son emerged from her. After his divorce from June, Caldwell married Virginia Fletcher. The marriage lasted until his death.

Caldwell wrote a total of 25 novels , about 150 short stories and twelve documentary non-fiction books . Most of his works have also been translated into German, and the best-known titles have had multiple editions. In the 1930s he was probably the most successful and discerning writer in the USA and was then mentioned in the same breath as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway . Caldwell is one of the lesser known authors today. Wayne Mixon attributes this in his article for the New Georgia Encyclopedia to the fact that the aggressive marketing of Caldwell's early works, which emphasized the permissive portrayal of sexual act, damaged his reputation as a serious author and led to the fact that a literary examination of his work was subsequently missing.

Works

Short stories (collections)

• American Earth , 1931
• We Are the Living , 1933
• Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories , 1935
• Saturday Afternoon , 1936
• Southways , 1938
• The Courting of Susie Brown , 1952
• Gulf Coast Stories , 1956
• Certain Women , 1957 (German Certain Women , 1958)
• When You Think of Me , 1959
• Men and Women , 1961 (German man and woman. Selected short stories , 1967)

other German-language short story collections:

• Uncle Henry's love nest. Stories , 1973
• Beechum, the candy man. Selected short stories , 1973
• Where the girls were different. Selected short stories , 1984

Novels

• The Bastard , 1929
• Poor Fool , 1930
• Tobacco Road , 1932 (Eng. Die Tabakstrasse , 1948; later also Die Tabakstrasse and Tobacco road )
• God's Little Acre , 1933 (dt. God's Little Acre , 1948)
• Journeyman , 1935 (German The Wandering Preacher , 1954)
• The Sacrilege of Alan Kent , 1936
• Trouble in July , 1940 (German A hot day , 1950; later also A hot day )
• All Night Long , 1942
• Georgia Boy , 1943
• Tragic Ground , 1944 (German sun city without stars , 1948)
• A House in the Uplands , 1946 ( A house in the hill country , 1957)
• The Sure Hand of God , 1947 (German God's infallible hand , 1950; later also In God's sure hand )
• This Very Earth , 1948 (German Opossum , 1952)
• A Place Called Estherville , 1949 ( Estherville , 1952)
• Episode in Palmetto , 1950
• A Lamp for Nightfall , 1952 ( light in the twilight , 1958)
• Love and Money , 1954
• Gretta , 1955
• Claudelle Inglish , 1958 (German Claudelle Inglish , 1959)
• Jenny by Nature , 1961 (German Jenny as she is , 1961)
• Close to Home , 1962 (German ... and black for the night , 1963)
• The Last Night of Summer , 1963 (dt. The last Summer Night , 1967)
• Miss Mamma Aimée , 1967 (German story of the cheerful widow Mangrum , 1968)
• Summertime Island , 1968 ( Mississippi Island , 1971)
• The Weather Shelter , 1969
• The Earnshaw Neighborhood , 1971
• Annette , 1973

Essays and other prose

• Tenant Farmers , 1935
• Some American People , 1935
• Moscow Under Fire , 1942 (war coverage for CBS Radio)
• All-Out on the Road to Smolensk , 1942 (war coverage for CBS Radio)
• Around About America , 1964 (Illustrated by Virginia Caldwell)
• Writing in America , 1967
• Afternoons in Mid America , 1976 (Illustrated by Virginia Caldwell)

Texts for illustrated books with Margaret Bourke-White

• You Have Seen Their Faces , 1937
• North of the Danube , 1939
• Say! Is This the USA , 1941
• Russia at War , 1942

Autobiographies

• Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write , 1951
• In Search of Bisco , 1965
• Deep South , 1968
• With All My Might , 1987

Children's books

• Molly Cottontail , 1958 (dt. Molly Baumwollschwänzchen , 1968)
• The Deer at Our House , 1966 ( our guest, the little deer , 1971)

Filmography

• 1941 - Tobacco Road ( Tobacco Road ), directed by John Ford
• 1958 God's Little Acre , directed by Anthony Mann
• 1961 Claudelle and Her Lovers , directed by Gordon Douglas
• 1983 - Le Bâtard (based on The Bastard ), directed by Bertrand van Effenterre
• 2004 - Certain Woman (based on a short story), directed by Bobby Abate, Peggy Ahwesh
• 2004 - The Sure Hand of God (based on a short story), directed by Michael Kolko

literature

• Günter Golle: Language and style at Erskine Caldwell . Jena 1961.
• Scott MacDonald (Ed.): Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell , 1981.
• Sylvia Jenkins Cook: Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit . Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge 1991.
• Harvey L. Klevar: Erskine Caldwell: A Biography . University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville 1993.
• Chris Vials: Whose Dixie? Erskine Caldwell's Challenge to Gone with the Wind and Dialectical Realism. In: Criticism 48: 1, 2006.

Web links

• Erskine Caldwell in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Erskine Caldwell in the catalog of the German National Library
• Review of the novel on The Daily Beast, April 30, 2012
• Review of Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia

Remarks

1. ↑ Modern Library - 100 best novels , accessed February 1, 2014.
2. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed February 1, 2014.
3. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 2, 2014.
4. ↑ cit. after Elisabeth Schnack. The den with the bitter figs . (Anthology) Zurich, Diogenes, 1967 .; P. 409.
5. ↑ Georgia Encyclopedia on Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's little Acre , accessed February 1, 2014.
6. ↑ Georgia Encyclopedia on Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's little Acre , accessed February 1, 2014.
7. ^ Members: Erskine Caldwell. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 20, 2019 . 
8. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.
9. ↑ American Dreams: Book Review by Nathaniel Rich , accessed January 24, 2014.
10. ^ Review of Tobacco Road and God's little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed January 24, 2014.
11. ^ Review of Tobacco Road and God's little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.
12. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.
13. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.
14. ^ Review of Tobacco Road and God's little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 2, 2014.
15. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.