Overview:
Like Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens' obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty's son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.First published in 1933, God's Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.
More bluntly than any white southern writer of the 1930s, Erskine Caldwell used the economic blight of the Depression to dramatize the dehumanizing effects of poverty in America. Caldwell’s climb to nationwide popularity after the publication of Tobacco Road in 1932 was crucial to the rise of proletarian writing in the United States.
Unlike many of his southern literary contemporaries, Caldwell wrote next to nothing about the southern past and saw no wistful splendor in it. He focused instead on the sorry southern present and its suffering underclass, white and black. At least as a young author, he believed that he could intervene in the Thirties environment of oppression and that what he wrote could improve the lives of the hungry and mistreated. Caldwell thus became the first southern white male author to extend the social protest tradition of naturalistic American novelists like Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. In his most productive years, Caldwell’s originality sprang from specifically regional sources, especially Depression-era agriculture in the South. Less well known but of continuing relevance is Caldwell’s treatment of southern factory work.
In God’s Little Acre (1933) Caldwell offers an indictment of the South’s anti-labor business culture, its opposition to industrial unionism, and its authoritarian textile mills. Yet he also gives hope for regional economic uplift and social betterment in the struggle for a democratic workplace.
Little Acre is a classic dark comedy, a satire that lampoons a broken South while holding a light to the toll that poverty takes on the hopes and dreams of the poor themselves.
"What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records."--Chicago Tribune
"Caldwell is one of the best . . . a master illusionist who can create, as Hemingway did, an impression of absolute reality."--Time Magazine
"A beautifully integrated story of the barren southern farm and the shut southern mill, and one of the finest studies of the southern poor white which has ever come into our literature. Writing in the brutal images of the life of his poor white people, Mr. Caldwell has caught in poetic quality the debased and futile aspiration of men and women restless in a world of long hungers which must be satisfied quickly, if at all."--Saturday Review of Literature
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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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