Erskine Caldwell

American · 1903 to 1987

Erskine Preston Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia, the son of Ira Sylvester Caldwell, an Associate Reformed Presbyterian minister, and Caroline Bell Caldwell, a schoolteacher. His father's ministry moved the family often through the rural South, and as a teenager Caldwell rode the back roads of east central Georgia at his father's side, helping carry relief to tenant farmers who had nothing to eat and nowhere else to go. He attended Erskine College in South Carolina and later the University of Virginia on scholarship, though he left both without a degree, and at Virginia he married a fellow student, Helen Lannegan, in 1925. He worked for a time as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal before turning fully to fiction, drawing directly on what he had witnessed as a boy. Tobacco Road, published in 1932, and God's Little Acre, published a year later, made him one of the best-selling novelists in America, together selling more than twenty million copies and establishing his reputation as a chronicler of poverty, racism, and hunger in the Depression-era South, rendered with a documentary plainness that could tip without warning into black comedy. He married three more times, most notably the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he produced the 1937 photo-documentary You Have Seen Their Faces. During the Second World War he reported from Moscow as a foreign correspondent. In his later decades he continued writing prolifically, publishing dozens of novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and in 1984 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His autobiography, With All My Might, appeared in 1987, the year he died of complications from emphysema and lung cancer at his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, at the age of eighty-three.