Erskine Caldwell

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small town of White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his wife Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell, a schoolteacher. Rev. Caldwell's ministry required moving the family often, to places including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When he was 15 years old, his family settled in Wrens, Georgia. His mother Caroline was from Virginia. Her ancestry included English nobility which held large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English ancestors and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell's ancestors were Scots-Irish and had also been in America since before the revolution and had fought in it. Caldwell's mother, a former teacher, tutored her son at home. Caldwell was 14 when he first attended a school. Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine College, a Presbyterian school in nearby South Carolina.

He dropped out of Erskine College to sign aboard a boat supplying guns to Central America. Caldwell entered the University of Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but was enrolled for only a year. He then became a football player, bodyguard, and salesman of "bad" real estate. After two more enrollments at college, Caldwell went to work for the Atlanta Journal, leaving in 1925 after a year, then moving to Maine where he stayed for five years, producing a story that won a Yale Review award for fiction and two novels of the Georgia poor. Caldwell's first published works were The Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930), but the works for which he is most famous are his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). His first book, The Bastard, was banned and copies of it were seized by authorities. With the publication of God's Little Acre, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated legal action against him for The Bastard. Caldwell was arrested at a book-signing there but was exonerated in court. In 1941, Caldwell reported from the USSR for Life magazine, CBS radio and the newspaper PM. He wrote movie scripts for about five years. Caldwell wrote articles from Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Through the 1930s Caldwell and his first wife Helen managed a bookstore in Maine. Following their divorce Caldwell married photographer Margaret Bourke-White, collaborating with her 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 obtained a visa from the USSR that allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent, documenting the war effort there. 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, who had drawn illustrations for a recent book of his, moving to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, later moving to Paradise Valley, Arizona, in 1977. Of his residence in the San Francisco Bay Area, he once said: "I live outside San Francisco. That's not exactly the United States." 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. Caldwell 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, did, and wished him to be buried near his family. Virginia died in December 2017 at age 98.

Erskine Caldwell's political sympathies were with the working class, and he used his experiences with farmers and common workers to write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life he presented public seminars on the typical conditions of tenant-sharecroppers in the South. Disillusionment with the government led Caldwell to compose a short story published in 1933, "A Message for Genevieve." In this story a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on charges of espionage.

Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, twelve nonfiction collections, two autobiographies, and two books for young readers. He also edited the influential American Folkways series, a 28-volume series of books about different regions of the United States.

In December 1984, Caldwell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.