Erskine Preston Caldwell

of White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his wife Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell, a schoolteacher. Rev. Caldwell's ministry required moving the family often, to places including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When he was 15 years old, his family settled in Wrens, Georgia.[4] His mother Caroline was from Virginia. Her ancestry included English nobility which held large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English ancestors and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell's ancestors were Scots-Irish and had also been in America since before the revolution and had fought in it.
Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine College, a Presbyterian school in nearby South Carolina. His political sympathies were with the working classes, and he used his experiences with farmers and common workers to write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life he presented public seminars on the typical conditions of tenant-sharecroppers in the South.[4]

in Connecticut, then in Arizona with third wife, June, then in San Francisco. During the last twenty years of his life, his routine was to travel the world for six months of each year, taking with him notebooks in which to jot down his ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published, but can be examined in a museum dedicated to him in the town square of Moreland, Georgia, where the home in which he was born was relocated and dedicated to his memory.
Caldwell died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He is buried in Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon. Although he never lived there, his stepson and fourth wife, Virginia Caldwell Hibbs,[9][10] did, and wished him to be buried near his family.[11] Virginia died in December 2017 aged 98.

is less in the service of social criticism than in other works in which he dealt with poor white southerners.

is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil. e Augusta during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil.

or satirical while others are lyrical, romantic and/or tragic. Most of them are laid against the background of the lives of ordinary people in the contemporary US South, the social milieu most familiar to the author - some being specifically located in his home state of Georgia.

a dysfunctional farming family in Georgia obsessed with sex and wealth. The novel's sexual themes were so controversial that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice asked a New York state court to censor it. Although controversial, the novel became an international best seller with over 10 million copies sold,[1] and was published as an Armed Services Edition during WWII. God's Little Acre is Caldwell's most popular novel, although his reputation is often tied to his 1932 novel Tobacco Road, which was listed in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.[1] God's Little Acre was later adapted as a 1958 film starring Robert Ryan.

Bourke-White and novelist Erskine Caldwell. It was first published in 1937 by Viking Press, with a paperback version by Modern Age Books following quickly. Bourke-White and Caldwell married in 1939.[1]

For this pictorial survey about rural American South and its troubles, Bronx-born Bourke-White took the pictures, while Georgia-born Caldwell wrote the text. Together, they both wrote captions:
Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash, and wrote with pleasure of having them "imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened." The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person captions.[2]
This book inspired James Agee to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).[3]

famous for his novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. The book was first published in 1949 by Duell, Sloan & Pearce[1] and later published in paperback by Signet Books. It would go on to sell more than 1.5 million copies. The novel centers on a biracial brother and sister, Ganus and Kathyanne Bazemore. After their mother dies, they move to a segregated town called Estherville to help take care of their sick aunt. They face abuse from the town that culminates in tragedy.

by Erskine Caldwell first published in 1935. The seventeen stories, only a few pages each, all deal with various tragedies occurring in the early twentieth century American South, chiefly caused by poverty or racism. Caldwell is most well known for his novels, such as Tobacco Road; however, Kneel to the Rising Sun is held in high acclaim by his critics.

where he draws in abundance the strikingly cruel stories, then funny and funny stories of anecdotal or fairy-tale character, then dramatic and tragic, revealing the full weight of the sad fate of a humiliated person. As a realist artist who wants, in his own words, "to get into the soul of people living nearby," he notices the social contrasts of American life and their influence on the fate of the individual.

temptation to cram lively and dramatic content into a stenciled Novella with a happy ending. Op became one of its subverters, the destroyer of its canons, supported by some critics, but especially willingly by publishers. It is no accident that the writer was accused of a predilection for depicting the dark, ugly sides of American life, and of deliberately "exploiting" the theme of poor and destitute people. He could not pass by the social evils of American reality with indifference.

Caldwell usually made the following reservation: don't let them take him for a preacher. He doesn't want to be accused of being biased. In his works, the reader will find everything that is in life, because his creations speak for themselves. Hence-some features of the narrator's manner. About the cruel, rude and savage in American life, especially characteristic of the American South ("payday on the Savannah river"), about the stupidity and injustice of the obdurate proprietor ("the Abe Latham Case", "the Negro in the well"), the writer sometimes tells with such external calm and chilling equanimity that it may give the impression that the artist is indifferent to the person. Caldwell categorically denies this: "I love ordinary people. I'm one of them. I hate those who look down on ordinary people,"he said in an interview with the Literary newspaper.

an American photographer and documentary photographer.[1] She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviet's five-year plan,[2] the first American female war photojournalist, and having one of her photographs (the construction of Fort Peck Dam) on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.[3] She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after developing symptoms