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 This book contains more than 150 previously unpublished letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955, at the peak of Caldwell's popularity and influence, all extensively annotated.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.

Erskine Caldwell has been compared to literary giants like Faulkner and Hemingway, yet he has also been reviled as peddler of pop trash. Was he a genius, or just a shooting star whose brilliance faded long before he stopped writing? Caldwell began his career in the late 1920s and gained fame for revealing the gritty backwoods South in novels such as his seminal ""Tobacco Road"". He wrote prolifically, sometimes as much as a book a year. As the editor of this book maintains, perhaps anyone who wrote so much would inevitably stumble. These 12 essays explore a variety of issues. They discuss Caldwell as humorist, social commentator, modernist, and revolutionary novelist. They examine his themes and tropes (political image, social injustice, the environment, ideological struggles) and his use of artistic devices (short stories, cubist strategies, repetition). A generous bibliography includes not only books on Caldwell but also chapters and forewords, journal articles, essays, news items and obituaries. The reader is encouraged to look at Caldwell with fresh eyes, to press beyond his controversial image, and to compare his works, especially his early ones, to those of any of the top names in literature.