His name is world famous. He is Erskine Caldwell. He has written over 60 books, 25 of which are novels. Two of his most significant works are the novels “Tobacco Road” (1932) and “God’s Thread” (1933). A main theme in his works is poverty in the southern states of the USA, which he witnessed firsthand. Erskine Caldwell is an American novelist, publicist and journalist, representative of realism in American literature.
He was born on December 17, 1903 in Georgia. 120 years have passed since his birth.
American writer Erskine Caldwell in London / Photo: Getty Images
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Caldwell was born into the family of a Presbyterian minister. He travels with his father and comes face-to-face with the lives of people in the small towns of the poor American South. He himself earned his living for some time as an agricultural laborer in cotton production, a driver, a cook, a waiter, a newspaperman, a mediator, a textile worker, a stonemason, and even as a professional football player.
He did not complete his higher education, but attended several colleges and attended the Universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania without graduating.
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He published his first short stories in 1928. They are about the lives of cotton plantation workers. In 1929, his first book was published – the novel “The Illegitimate”, followed by the short story “The Poor Fool” (1930). In 1931, he published the collection of short stories “American Land”, and one of his masterpieces – the novel “Tobacco Road” appeared in 1932 (it was staged as a play on Broadway for 7 years). In 1933, another of his masterpieces was published – “God’s Thread”. Three years later – “The traveling preacher”, and after that – “Kneeling before the rising sun”.
One of his serious works was a collaboration with the photographer Margaret Burke-White (b.a. one of his four wives), with whom they published “You Have Seen Their Faces” in 1937. The book is about the Great Depression in the American South.
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In 1943 “The Boy from Georgia” was published, and in 1944 – (1944) – “Land of Suffering” – both works with a sharp social tone. The writer published his first autobiography entitled “Call it Experience” in 1951, and the second – “With All My Might” – in the year of his death (1987). Caldwell also has one children’s book published in 1958 – Molly Cottontail. He is also the author of many travel books and essays.
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The writer died on April 11, 1987 in Paradise Valley, Arizona and did not live to see the great changes in the world in the 90s, but he experienced no less dramatic time. In his private life he had four marriages: to Helen Lanigan, with whom he had three children; with Margaret Burke-White, already mentioned; with June Johnson, with whom he had a son, and with Virginia Fletcher, with whom he lived for three decades, until his death.
Many of his books have been published in Bulgarian, among them the collection “Fly in the Coffin”, containing works from several of his works listed above.
Caldwell’s books are realistic. They reflect the life of the country man in capitalist America. In 1934, the writer embarked on a long tour of the United States, after which he traveled to Czechoslovakia.
During the Second World War (from June to September 1941) he was a correspondent of “Life” magazine in the USSR. He published “Russia at War” (1941), “Moscow under Bombs” (1942), “Everything is thrown against Smolensk” (1942) and others.
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From 1935 to 1945, Caldwell published several books on the economic problems of the United States and Russia. Three of them – “These faces are familiar to you” (1937, a work about the southern rentiers-politicians), “North of the Danube” (1938) and “Is this the USA?” (1941). All of them, as well as the “Russia at War” photo album, are illustrated by Margaret Burke-White.
During the war, Caldwell lived through the bombing of Moscow, visited the front lines in Smolensk, connected with Soviet partisans, and when he returned to the United States, lectured around the country on the heroism of the Red Army.
He visited Russia again in 1953 and 1963. Caldwell also visited Bulgaria in 1963 and 1973.
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They rank Caldwell’s name next to the great masters of American prose – Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck. And that is undeniable. The period 1944-1949 saw the publication of his books about the poor people of Georgia: “House on the Hill” (1946), “The Palm of God” (1947), “This Same Land” (1948) and “Austerville” (1949), “Episode in the Palmetto” (1950), “Night Shift”, “Collected Stories” (1953), “Claudel English” (1959), “America Across” (1964), “Next Door to Earnshaw” (1971), ” Midday in the Middle of America” (1976, travelogues), etc.
From the second half of the 1960s, Caldwell worked more in the journalistic-documentary genre. He published Writing in America (1967) and The Deep South. Memories and Reflections (1968).
During the Cold War, Caldwell was an active fighter in defense of peace. The pictures in his works are unbiased and harshly truthful. It is known that in the writing profession, he bowed to the genius of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to the ability of the Russian writer and playwright to reveal the main thing through context and detail, to express a position through humor and the grotesque.
November 18, 1963: American writer Erskine Caldwell (1903 – 1987), Photo: Getty Images
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In his last autobiography, entitled “With All My Power,” Caldwell wrote: “I have always considered my work more important than anything else. I may have had to be selfish, and for nothing but it , not to think.” He explained his workaholism with an inner restlessness that did not give him peace. He wanted to describe “all his impressions”, like an artist who believes he can “catch a moment” in his painting.
The time in which Erskine Caldwell was writing was a time of acute social conflict in the 1920s, a time of destruction in the years of World War II, and a time of disunity in the Cold War years of the 1970s. This is the era in which the brightest representatives of American prose are definitely oriented to the left – they increasingly write about the drama in the lives of the majority of Americans, and not about the shiny side of life and the myth of the American dream.
In this connection a very good comparison is made by one critic, who says that Caldwell “stripped the South of its magnolias.”
American writer Erskine Caldwell (1903 – 1987) and his wife, illustrator Virginia Moffett Caldwell Hibbs (1919 – 2017), March 18, 1959 / Photo: Getty Images
Something must be said here, which undoubtedly had its impact on the writer even in his childhood years. His father was a well-read man, a fighter against prejudice in semi-rural Georgia. In this region, famous for picking cotton, the conservative spirit and painful memories of Negro slavery still lingered. Caldwell’s mother was fluent in and taught Latin and French. In this family environment, Caldwell grew up not only well-read, but also alert to clearly see the processes in society.
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In one of his autobiographies he wrote: “I learned my most important lesson: the best and most comprehensive teacher is life.” At the university, he studied not only literature, but also sociology. When he moved to Maine, many newspaper editors returned his manuscripts because they didn’t find it “interesting” to have someone tell them about cotton pickers and common laborers. But he does not give up describing the lives of ordinary working people. When his book of short stories “American Land” was published in 1931, Caldwell already had a clear and unwavering creative concept: to show as a mirror the nation’s weaknesses not only during the Great Depression, but as a constant state of American reality.
Caldwell paints in an uncompromising way the misery, material and moral degradation, ossification, inhuman relations, cruelty and the disappearance of everything bright and humane in the lives of small, ruinous farmers and the formally freed, but de facto still enslaved Negroes.
Does Caldwell debunk the myth of America and the American dream? – One critic answers this question as follows: “Caldwell lets us know that, as an American, he is pained by the gap between the vanity of the rich and the real poverty of the lives of the little people; between the waste of words and reality. In his works it breathes that America that no congressman would be proud of to win an election. From the South in his novels they shiver with northern cold, chill wind and gloomy despair. There is no sun in this South!… And the most terrible thing is that everything in his works is described so truthfully that there are no words with which to refute their author!…”
Emmy MARIANSKA
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2023-12-29 19:40:51
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