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.

Originally published in 1932, Caldwell's novel told the story of the Lester family, poor Georgia sharecroppers who no longer farmed the land, but lived by whatever means possible. Caldwell's picture of the rural South challenged notions of the dignified and polite Antebellum South and depicted an image that was grotesque, violent, and morally bankrupt. Southern readers immediately found Caldwell's novel needlessly exaggerated and offensive, while Northern critics read his story as an indictment upon a failed Southern economic system in dire need of reform.

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.

This collection of ninety-six stories was first published in 1953 and presents the best of Erskine Caldwell's short fiction from his most productive period of work. Included is "Crown-Fire," which James Dickey praised as "the best story in the language," and such personal favorites of Caldwell as "Country Full of Swedes," "The Windfall," "Horse Thief," "Yellow Girl," and "Kneel to the Rising Sun."

This memoir presents a self-portrait of Esrkine Caldwell's first 30 years as a writer, with special emphasis on his long and hard apprenticeship before he emerged as one of the most widely read and controversial writers of his time. All the while conveying the enormous amount of drive and dedication with which he pursued the writer's life, Caldwell tells of his struggles to find his own voice, his travels and his various jobs, which ranged from back-breaking common labour to much sought-after positions in radio, film and journalism. Such literary personages as Nathanael West, Maxwell Perkins and Margaret Mitchell appear in the book, as does Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects and whom he also married. Including a self-interview, it offers insights into Caldwell's imagination, his sources of inspiration and his writing habits, as well as his views on critics and reviewers, publishers and booksellers.

In 1965, more than five decades after his forced estrangement from his black boyhood friend Bisco, Erskine Caldwell set out across the South to find him. On the journey, which took him from South Carolina to Arkansas, Caldwell spoke to many people on the pretense of asking Bisco's whereabouts: a black college professor in Atlanta, Georgia; a white real estate salesman in Demopolis, Alabama; a black sharecropper in the Yazoo Basin of the Mississippi Delta; a transplanted white New England housewife in Bastrop, Louisiana; and others. Eighteen of those conversations, with Caldwell's commentary, make up this book.

Caldwell made his journey at the zenith of the civil rights movement. Bisco, whom Caldwell never found, becomes a symbol for the South's race problem, to which he sought an answer in the emotions, experiences, and attitudes of those he encountered.

In this appealing collection of fourteen interrelated stories, twelve-year-old William Stroup recounts the ludicrous predicaments and often self-imposed hardships his family endures. Playing on the tension between Martha, his hardworking, sensible mother, and Morris, his disarmingly likable but shiftless and philandering father, William tells of Pa's flirtation with a widow, his swapping match with a band of gypsies, his battle of wits with a traveling silk-tie saleswoman, and his get-rich-quick schemes based on selling Ma's old love letters and collecting scrap iron. Often caught in the middle of the Stroups' bungles is Handsome Brown, their yard hand, as well as a number of animals with all-too-human qualities: Ida, the mule; Pretty Sooky, the runaway calf; College Boy, the fighting cock; a small flock of woodpeckers that favor Handsome's head over a tree; and goats who commandeer the roof of the Stroups' house. Georgia Boy was a special book to Caldwell, and its humor is less in the service of social criticism than in other works in which he dealt with poor white southerners. Beneath Georgia Boy's folksy lightheartedness, however, lie the problems of indigence, racism, and apathy that Caldwell confronted again and again in his fiction.

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South-from South Carolina to Arkansas-to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in "You Have Seen Their Faces," a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives," and James Agee and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," which it preceded by more than three years.

Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

The enduring fame of Joel Harris as a skillful storyteller had its beginning with the publication of the first of his enchanting Uncle Remus stories. These and other local color tales were written to sound as if they were being told to a group of small children on a winter night beside a blazing fireplace of a middle Georgia farmhouse. And ever since his stories first appeared in print, it has yet to be resolved who enjoys them the most--a child or the adult reading them aloud.

I'm just an ordinary writer, Erskine Caldwell once wrote. ""I'm not trying to sell anything; I'm not trying to buy anything. I'm just trying to present my vision of life."" His ostensibly unsolicitous vision of Southern grotesques, of the slack-jawed, pellagra-ridden sharecroppers, repressed farmwives, and over sexed nymphets, elicited, however, anything but an ""ordinary"" response. Hailed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, reviled by others as a pornographer or sensationalist, Caldwell was once called ""America's most popular author."" Once the furore flagged, Caldwell was relegated to the ""mansions of subliterature,"" where his reputation resides today. This book contains more than 150 previously unpublished letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955, at the peak of Caldwell's popularity and influence, all extensively annotated. The Introduction assays Caldwell's significance in American popular culture and literary studies and establishes the importance of Caldwell's correspondence as a means of understanding the intentions of a man who was otherwise terse and unforthcoming about his work.

As Mary Hood writes in her foreword, "The Sacrilege of Alan Kent is unique. Comparisons are not odious, they are impossible. There is nothing like it in any of Caldwell's published works, nor can we find its example in all of American literature."

Alan Kent is a wanderer, a seeker. Driven by, or fleeing from, unnamed forces, he struggles against the hardening effects of a brutal and indifferent world. In a series of episodes, Erskine Caldwell tells the semiautobiographical story of Kent's childhood, roving early manhood, and transformation into an artist.

The episodes, which range from brief, graphic sketches to one-sentence impressions, are filled with elemental images of light and darkness, blood and water, earth and sky. Although an early work, "The Sacrilege of Alan Kent" shows readers the poetic economy, stark naturalism, and concern for the South's poorest people that became the hallmarks of Caldwell's later work.

Portraying a region steeped religious piety and ritual, excess and prejudice, "Deep South" is a product both of Erskine Caldwell the storyteller and Erskine Caldwell the minister's son.

Reverend Ira Sylvester Caldwell's missionary work took him and his family deep into the region commonly referred to as the Bible Belt. His son, Erskine, was at his side on innumerable home visits with the elderly, sick, and poor of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida. By the time the younger Caldwell left home at seventeen, he had also witnessed such varieties of religious experience as "Church of God all-night camp meetings, Holy Roller exhibitions on splintery wooden floors, primitive Christian baptismal immersions in muddy creeks, Seventh-Day Adventist foot-washings, Body of Christ blood-drinking communions, Kingdom of God snakehandlings, Full Redeemer glossolalia services, Fire Baptized Holiness street-corner rallies, Catholic mass at midnight on Christmas Eve, the rituals of Jewish synagogues, and . . . philosophical lectures in Unitarian churches."

Decades later, Caldwell drew on this fertile background when he toured Georgia and neighboring states in order to hear firsthand from ministers and churchgoers about how southern Protestantism was faring amid the social upheaval of the mid-1960s. "Deep South" offers a rich mix of anecdotes, memories, interviews, and observations that point to what may be the true essence of southern spirituality.