Tobacco Road

Product Information

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. He dropped out of Erskine College to sign aboard a boat supplying guns to Central America. [3] Caldwell entered the University of Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but was enrolled for only a year. [3] He then became a football player, bodyguard, and salesman of "bad" real estate. [3] 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. Tobacco Road tells the story of the Lester family. The Lester family consists of Jeeter and Ada Lester as well as their seventeen children. The Lesters are former cotton farmers (turned tenant farmers) who live in the Southern part of the United States. They live on a crumbling plantation that once belonged to their ancestors, with two of their children. These two children - Ellie May and Dude - cannot afford to live on their own. They are both handicapped - the unmarried daughter has a cleft lip, and the son is mentally disabled. 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. [11]

At the beginning of Tobacco Road, the Lesters’ family friend, Lov Bensey, trudges home, near the train yard, with a bushel of turnips he obtained 7 miles away. Lov makes a stop at the Lesters’ house to talk to Jeeter about Lov's wife, Pearl, who is also Jeeter’s twelve year old daughter. He also encounters Dude, who at sixteen is the youngest of the Lester sons; Jeeter’s wife, Ada; eighteen-year-old Ellie May, who has a cleft lip; and Grandma Lester. The family is starving, and tries to steal Lov’s turnips. Annoyed more than sympathetic or pitying, Lov goes home. If you're looking for an off-beat classic, or depression-era literature that isn't too depressing, Tobacco Road is a great choice. Sumner Defeated in Fight on a Book: Magistrate Greenspan Finds Novel by Erskine Caldwell Is Not Obscene". The New York Times. May 24, 1933. p.19.Novelist Erskine Caldwell's Ashes Rest in Ashland, Ore". Jefferson Public Radio. Archived from the original on May 24, 2013 . Retrieved March 14, 2012. Caldwell, Erskine (16 May 2017). Three Novels: Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, and Place Called Estherville. Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1-5040-4547-6– via google books. Years ago I was visiting Daddy's birthplace (at home) on a cotton farm in southwestern North Carolina, between Hayesville, North Carolina and Hiwassee, Georgia. I was sitting on the steps of Philadelphia Church with my cousin Rex and I asked him why Grandma and Grandpa moved around so much? He laughed asking me “you don’t know?” No, I didn't know. Rex said they were itinerant sharecroppers and they had to move where land was more fertile, where their crops would grow to feed the family. (I’m from a small (pop. 13,900) Florida city in north Florida, not a farmer for sure, so this came as news to me, the why of their moving frequently.) Disillusionment with the government led Caldwell to compose a short story published in 1933, "Sylvia". In this story a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on charges of espionage. One of the few times in my time here on goodreads when I feel like writing: OMG. ... OMG, and really meaning it.

No, the book was not depressing to me personally although it was a depressing subject. The book was about a hard life that was slow to disappear. It takes a few hours to spend with a family like the Lesters, reading their story. It takes a lifetime to appreciate the message behind it. The land was all the Lester family had known as poor and illiterate farmers. (Of course this was prior to any Headstart programs, Food Stamp Programs, any governmental assistance programs whatsoever.) Grandma and Grandpa, Mary Jane Gibson Ledford and Mark Ledford ---Hard working people, maybe in early 40's?Experts, however, have ranked it as one of the hundred most significant novels written in English in the 20th century. And, especially after its success as a Broadway play, the novel eventually sold ten million copies. Let's try this - just exactly what was Caldwell trying to say about these people? Did he love them or hate them? Was he making fun of their ignorance, or making excuses for it? And for that matter, were they really that ignorant and unfeeling, or had poverty and hunger just taken everything away from them? Lester Jeeter also had a love/hate relationship with God, blaming him for every bad thing that happened, apparently never hearing the adage "God helps those who help themselves." What was Caldwell trying to say there? Was he making fun of religion, or using it to justify poor people's reliance on it?

Erskine Caldwell signing a copy of book, "Tobacco Road", April 1936 Harris & Ewing photography collection, Library of Congress

Lov departs and Caldwell reflects on Jeeter's position as a tenant farmer in the South. Even though Jeeter, like so many others around him, had the urge to plant a crop during this time of the year, there was nothing he could do. His landlord was an absentee who abandoned Jeeter and the rest of those who had lived on his land and given him shares of their crop in exchange for credit for seeds and fertilizer. The stores in the city would not grant any more credit to Jeeter or any of the other farmers because it was too risky and there were too many asking for it. 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. a b c d e f g h i "Erskine Caldwell Dead at 83". AP NEWS. Paradise Valley, Arizona. April 12, 1987 . Retrieved October 1, 2022. Erskine Caldwell aims to take the reader out of their comfort zone into unknown territory. He wanted to challenge us. And he succeeded. Many scenes were filled with cruel images. Caldwell's mother, a former teacher, tutored her son at home. [3] Caldwell was 14 when he first attended a school. [3]