Erskine Caldwell : the journey from Tobacco Road : a biography

Resource Information

The work Erskine Caldwell : the journey from Tobacco Road : a biography represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Erskine Caldwell : the journey from Tobacco Road : a biography

Title remainder

the journey from Tobacco Road : a biography

Statement of responsibility

by Dan B. Miller

Creator

• Miller, Dan B

Subject

• Biographies
• Biographies
• Biography
• Caldwell, Erskine
• Caldwell, Erskine
• Caldwell, Erskine, 1903-1987
• Caldwell, Erskine, 1903-1987
• Intellectual life
• Biografie
• Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Biography
• Novelists, American | Biography | 20th century
• Since 1865
• Southern States
• Southern States -- Intellectual life -- 1865-
• Southern States | Intellectual life | 1865-
• Novelists, American

Genre

• Biography
• Biographies

Language

eng

Summary

• Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road presents the fascinating life and times of a prolific and influential - yet nearly forgotten - figure in American literature. In the 1930s and 40s, Erskine Caldwell's impassioned work dealing with the Southern poor - most notably, the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre - earned him wide critical acclaim. Although many Southerners reviled him for his brutal expose's of their region, literary scholars at the time ranked him alongside Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Steinbeck. William Faulkner thought him one of America's five greatest novelists, and as late as 1960, Caldwell was under consideration for the Nobel Prize
• Although Caldwell worked for years in abject poverty, eventually his commercial success matched his lofty critical standing. The dramatic adaptation of Tobacco Road became the biggest hit in Broadway history, and paperback editions of Caldwell's novels - frequently under attack for their explicit sexuality - sold in record numbers around the globe. By the 1960s, in fact, his publicists declared him "The World's Best-Selling Novelist," and by 1970 he had written more than one hundred short stories and twenty-five novels. This should have secured Caldwell an enduring place in America's literary history but today he is largely forgotten, one of the great disappearing acts in American letters
• Caldwell's personal life was no less complicated than his professional one. Lonely and isolated as a boy, Caldwell treated his own children with alternating neglect and brutality. He was married four times (once to the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White), had a number of extramarital affairs, drank heavily, and was prone to violent mood swings. Yet Caldwell could be extraordinarily generous, gentle, and funny, a man of startling inconsistencies and startling energy

Biography type

individual biography

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

• 813/.52
• B

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PS3505.A322

LC item number

Z74 1995

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography