Erskine Preston Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, and died on April 11, 1987. He was an American novelist and short story writer. Caldwell wrote about poverty, racism, and social issues in the Southern United States. His novels, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), received praise from critics.

Tobacco Road sold 10 million copies, and God's Little Acre sold 14 million copies. These books are among the best-selling American novels of all time. Tobacco Road was adapted into a 1933 play that held a Broadway record for the longest run, but this record has since been broken.

Early years

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small town of White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only child of Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and his wife, Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell, who was a schoolteacher. Because Rev. Caldwell’s job required moving often, the family lived in several places, including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina. When Caldwell was 15 years old, his family moved to Wrens, Georgia. His mother, Caroline, was born in Virginia. Her ancestors included English nobility who owned large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell’s ancestors were also Scots-Irish and had lived in America before the American Revolution. They also fought in the Revolution.

Caldwell’s mother, who had been a teacher, taught him at home. Caldwell was 14 years old when he first attended school.

Caldwell went to Erskine College, a Presbyterian school in nearby South Carolina, but he did not graduate from the college.

Career

Caldwell left Erskine College to join a boat that delivered weapons to Central America. He began studying at the University of Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy but studied there for only one year. After that, he worked as a football player, bodyguard, and salesman of "bad" real estate.

Caldwell returned to college twice more before starting a job at the Atlanta Journal in 1925. He left the job after one year and moved to Maine, where he lived for five years. During this time, he wrote a story that won a fiction award from the Yale Review and two novels about poor people in Georgia.

Caldwell’s first published books were The Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930). However, he is best known for his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). His first book, The Bastard, was banned, and copies were taken by authorities. After God’s Little Acre was published, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice started legal action against him for The Bastard. Caldwell was arrested during a book-signing event but was found not guilty in court.

In 1941, Caldwell worked as a reporter for Life magazine, CBS radio, and the newspaper PM while in the USSR. He also wrote movie scripts for about five years. Later, he wrote articles about Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Personal life

In the 1930s, Caldwell and his first wife, Helen, ran a bookstore in Maine. After they divorced, Caldwell married photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Together, they worked on three photo-documentaries: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), North of the Danube (1939), and Say, Is This The USA (1941). During World War II, Caldwell received a visa from the USSR, which allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent, reporting on the war effort there.

After returning from the war, Caldwell moved to Connecticut, then to Arizona with his third wife, June Johnson (J.C. Martin). In 1957, he married Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, who had illustrated a recent book of his. They moved to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, later relocating to Paradise Valley, Arizona, in 1977. Caldwell once said about living in the San Francisco Bay Area: "I live outside San Francisco. That's not exactly the United States." For the last twenty years of his life, Caldwell traveled the world for six months each year, carrying notebooks to record his ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published but are available for viewing in a museum located in the town square of Moreland, Georgia, where his childhood home was moved and dedicated to his memory.

Caldwell died on April 11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona, from complications of emphysema and lung cancer. He is buried in Scenic Hills Memorial Park in Ashland, Oregon. Although he never lived there, his stepson and fourth wife, Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, wished for him to be buried near his family. Virginia passed away in December 2017 at the age of 98.

Caldwell’s grandson, Adam Hunter Caldwell, is a fine arts instructor at Academy of Art University.

Politics

Erskine Caldwell supported the working class and wrote stories based on his experiences with farmers and everyday workers, showing their lives and challenges. Later, he gave public talks about the difficult conditions faced by sharecroppers in the southern United States.

His disappointment with the government led him to write a short story published in 1933 called "A Message for Genevieve." In this story, a female journalist is killed by a group of soldiers after being sentenced in a secret court for spying.

Works

Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, twelve nonfiction books, two books about his own life, and two books for young readers. He also edited the important American Folkways series, which is a series of 28 books that describe different areas of the United States.