Tobacco Road

Product Information

Caldwell, a heavy smoker, 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 Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, [19] [20] did, and wished him to be buried near his family. [21] Virginia died in December 2017 at age 98. Every year Jeeter thinks “if I can get cotton seeds and guano” everything will be fine. But of course seeds and fertilizer cost money. There’s plenty of hopelessness but no money. And Jeeter continues to await a windfall of some kind. Caldwell claimed that he wrote the novel as "a rebuke of the perfumed 'moonlight and magnolias' literature of the South." Well, it was that. Erskine Caldwell does a commendable job of emphasizing how socioeconomic hardships negatively impact the psyche and relationships of everyday people. He encourages the reader to tap into their sociological imagination and discover the underlying institutional problems that heighten personal issues. The Lesters become increasingly demoralized as they try to make sense of the uncertainty faced. As a result, the family descends into mayhem, which causes separation and death for some relatives. Update this section! This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!

Erskine Caldwell specialized in portraying misery and wretchedness of man and was a great expert of human distress. Tobacco Road is one of the most effective trips to the bottom of human existence. Daddy said he never had a 'real' toothbrush until he joined the service when he was 17. (He made them from a twig of a specific tree branch by flaring and separating one end to act as bristles. He showed us how he did it on one visit to see Grandma.) Caldwell, Jay E. (2016). Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, and the popular Front: Photojournalism in Russia. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820350226. The Lester family is starving -- literally -- and the little they might acquire is consumed by a hierarchy, a survival of the fittest. Grandmother Lester knows she is expendable and keeps out of the way. For all the Lester females, silence is power to a certain extent. Except for the once-silent mother Ada and Bessie, who is not technically a Lester, I don't believe any of them speak; but they watch, and act when they can. The father Jeeter does not act, but he does talk, repeating himself all the time: No one is listening.a b "Erskine Caldwell". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on October 22, 2012 . Retrieved October 21, 2012. Collins, Carvel (July 1, 1958). "Erskine Caldwell at Work: A Conversation With Carvel Collins". The Atlantic . Retrieved October 1, 2022. I have underlined what I question. Does poverty do that to the extent that it is drawn in this book? I do not equate poverty with stupidity. The Lesters had seventeen kids. Five died. When the novel begins only two (Dude and Ellie May, an eighteen-year-old with an extremely ugly cleft lip) remain still at home with mom (Ada), dad (Jeeter) and grandma. The son Dude who is sixteen gets married to a women preacher named Bessie Rice. She is thirty-nine. She has a deformed face. These six individuals and a few others are drawn as imbeciles, as animals, as depraved, crude human beings. Religion is used as an excuse - for laziness, for doing nothing, for accepting fate. The only sign of hope are the ten children who have left. Little is known or said about them. The little After he returned from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in Connecticut, then in Arizona with third wife, June Johnson (J.C. Martin). In 1957, Caldwell married Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, who had drawn illustrations for a recent book of his, [14] moving to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, [17] later moving to Paradise Valley, Arizona, in 1977. [14] Of his residence in the San Francisco Bay Area, he once said: "I live outside San Francisco. That's not exactly the United States." [18] 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.

I loved Caldwell's writing and will read more books written by him. It was all I expected and more. The audiobook narration by John MacDonald is good. The intonation matches the language of these uneducated, poor, depraved souls. Of course the dialog is filled with grammatical errors. Rich goes on to say that Erskine Caldwell is a "progenitor of what could be called the degenerate school of American fiction," which I suppose could be called a subgenre of the so-called grit-lit genre. At any rate, it seems that a straight line can be drawn from Caldwell to writers such as Harry Crews, who also attempted to combine tragedy and comedy in their novels. Of course they made silly choices, but they were aided in this by unscrupulous people such as the Captain, the car salesman, and the "hotel" manager. They did not know any better and were taken advantage of because of it.

In Jeeter Lester’s case, the landowner, “Captain John,” got out of the farming business and left the community, and no one in town will lend Jeeter the money or supplies to lay in a fresh crop. Yet Jeeter insists that he should be able to farm in the old way, and not have to go work in a mill as many other farmers whom he knows have done: “The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me” (p. 27).