Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
1976
Keywords
Erskine Caldwell
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English, General Literature, and Rhetoric
First Advisor
Sheldon Grebstein
Second Advisor
Vincent Freimarck
Third Advisor
Charles Carpenter
Abstract
The enormous success of Jack Kirkland’s staging of Tobacco Road brought public attention in 1934 to a young Southern writer who had already been noticed by reviewers for two collections of short stories, American Earth (1931) and We Are The Living (1933), the novel Tobacco Road (1932), and God’s Little Acre (1933). Viking Press had just defeated The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice with a well-publicized defense of that last earthy story, and Caldwell, who was temporarily working in Hollywood, gave promise that he could satisfy both popular and critical tastes. Here was a writer out of the Southern Renaissance who wrote taut American English with a distinct social consciousness in the worst years of the Depression, yet whose rich humor demonstrated that comic perception and harsh realism were not mutually exclusive. His ribald stories of grotesque rural Americans baffled by the world about them, narrated with calculated understatement, inspired critics to link his name with Anderson’s and Hemingway’s and to utter extravagant predictions for his future. But now at thirty-two, only three years after his long apprenticeship had ended, Caldwell’s most significant books were already behind him. During the next ten years he published all the remaining fiction that would ever merit serious critical consideration: Journeyman (1935), Trouble in July (1940), Georgia Boy (1943), Tragic Ground (1944), and the short story collections Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935), Southways (1938), and Jackpot (1940).
From 1934 to 1944 Caldwell’s reputation rose to a peak and rapidly subsided. Though he has continued to write into the present decade, critics had all but abandoned him by the end of World War II. His mass audience followed him well into the fifties but it too declined, though never to a point where he has not had a dozen or so titles in print or lacked a publisher. Today, more than forty years after Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, and despite the fact that his books have sold a total of seventy-five million copies in forty countries, Caldwell is largely forgotten. His name means nothing to the young, and to older readers it invokes only the memory of an author whose best-selling books were once considered salacious. Academic criticism has neglected him for many years though he still elicits passing reference in histories of American literature or specialized studies. In these he is inevitably grouped with other writers to whom he is unfavorably compared.
....
Instead of approaching Caldwell from the standard historical perspective as a writer whose lengthy career has been a long, unfulfilled promise, I prefer at this late date in his life to treat him as the author of several novels of real value and of a number of durable and accomplished short stories. I think that this productive writer—and on occasion a figure of genuine ability—should be more adequately understood a generation after his greatest triumphs. Further, I believe that his writing requires a study that offers a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of his best work, rather than a recondite treatment of some limited aspect of it. There is no lurking suspicion in my mind that Caldwell has somehow been denied his rightful place in American letters as the result of critical ignorance, or that under the proper conditions a Caldwell revival is possible. Rather, I propose only that Caldwell should be recognized as an important minor figure in the broad tradition of American Naturalism. A product of the Southern Renaissance, among the most notable movements in modern American letters, he captured the imagination of scholar and casual reader alike with the uniqueness of his characters and motifs. He succeeded in combining the objective narrative stance of Naturalism with the intimate depiction of emotion and irrationality that characterizes the modern anti-hero. In some respects he is among the earliest American practitioners of 20th century black humor. Nothing human is alien to him. What Ronald Martin has said about the once popular Joseph Hergesheimer applies even more aptly to Erskine Caldwell: “Where his art has failings the particular failings are instructive. They illuminate some of the factors which define a writer as a minor writer. They also help to reveal the relationship between commercial and serious fiction and to show some of the effects of popular success on a dedicated author” (12).
This dissertation, then, will be chiefly concerned with Caldwell’s best fiction. In writing it my guiding purpose has been to remember that while his lesser efforts may often illuminate his triumphs, they must never detract from his accomplishments nor be allowed to stand as measure of his worth. Of course, it will not be possible to ignore the extraordinary difference in quality between books written within a short period of time, or to ask oneself how the author of a good piece of writing could conceivably be capable of such a bad one, even years later; and from time to time I shall hazard opinions on this subject, especially because my view varies from the common judgment that Caldwell simply “sold out.” Although I have little to say about his inferior fiction, I am aware that the very existence of bad writing demands continual evaluation of the good. I propose here to offer a long overdue scholarly evaluation and analysis of a living author whose contribution to our literature still remains to be determined.
Recommended Citation
Devlin, James E., "The fiction of Erskine Caldwell" (1976). Graduate Dissertations and Theses. 310.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/dissertation_and_theses/310