Erskine Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 12
nonfiction books, and 150 short stories.
By the late 1940s, he had sold more books than any other American writer
and by 1960 his sales exceeded 60 million.
However, Dan B. Miller confesses that prior
to 1989 he had never even heard of Caldwell.
He only became aware of him when he read that the writer's papers had
been deposited at Dartmouth College and would be available to researchers.
"His
name did not ring a bell. I had never
come across one of his novels in a bookstore, nor seen his name in an anthology,
syllabus, or critical evaluation of American literature. Neither had most of my peers, although a few
claimed to have heard of (but not read) a novel called Tobacco Road....
An index of
American best-sellers confirmed that Caldwell's books had sold a staggering 70
million copies. Although most of his
success had taken place in the late 1940s and 1950s, one Caldwell novel, God's Little Acre, still ranked as high
in total sales as any single work by Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or
Steinbeck."
What emerges from Miller's thoroughly
researched and very readable -- and long overdue -- biography (published in
1994) is the portrait of a writer who was as flawed and as contradictory, but
also as memorable, as the characters he created.
Because his fiction is a curious mixture of
comedy and tragedy, he is a writer that critics always struggled to
pigeonhole. He specialized in writing
about "po' white" southerners, people whose plight he sympathized
with, while at the same time he could not help viewing them with disdain and
little or no affection.
He went to court several times to keep his
books from being banned on obscenity charges.
His defense was that if his books were obscene it was only because the
truth was obscene. He won every case.
There was even a time that critics ranked
him as the third member, along with Faulkner and Wolfe, in a great triumvirate
of southern novelists. However, Miller
writes that "[t]oday Erskine
Caldwell has been virtually forgotten by popular readers and scholarly critics
alike, and he surely represents one of the greatest disappearing acts in our
literary history."
One of the strengths of Miller's book
results from the fact that he had heretofore been ignorant of Caldwell's career. That allowed him to approach his subject
clear-eyed and with no preconceptions as he conducted his research and read
Caldwell's work for the first time.
And thanks to Miller's discovery, we now have
a better understanding of why Caldwell rose so high and fell so far.
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