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Fiction. Literature. HTML: The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: "[A] story of force and beauty" (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and their twelve children are overcome by the fractured and violent society around them. Banned and burned when first released in 1932, Tobacco Road is a brutal examination of poverty's dehumanizing influence by one of America's great masters of political fiction. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library..… (more)
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I wonder how it would fare in literature course today, not well, I think. Certainly both the religious conservative and the political correctnik would find much to appall them. The novel deals with the more or less final days of a white Southern family, the Lesters, which over the generations has slipped to the level of sharecropper, and lives in abject, brutalizing poverty. The characters are so wretched for the most part that it is hard to feel the milk of human kindness flooding in their direction, largely because they are without love or mercy for each other. I think that in several respects it could be compared to Liam O'Flaherty's novel Famine. Perhaps the most significant difference is that in Caldwell's book the land's refusal to support the people has gone on long enough to rot out any better natures the Lesters might have had; whereas Flaherty's impoverished family goes to its doom more rapidly, and the total decay of their characters is forestalled by wholesale death.
If you allow yourself (and I did) there is dark, dark humor in some of the family's grotesque in-fighting, and the night that the preacher woman, Sister Bessie, spends in a city "hotel" with her teenage husband and his father is handled in a deadpan manner that almost dares the reader to smirk.
What comes through with increasingly clarity as the short novel progresses is that the land itself has ruined these people, though not so much the wasted, worn soil as the protagonist's tenacious refusal to give it up. To the bitter-most final pages he is enduring in his belief that this land is his salvation. And when it is not, in the most grusome way imaginable, this makes the book's final sentence, spoken by his teenage son a mind-boggling return to novel's beginning.
For those who would find Tobacco Road like eating glass, I would suggest reading his childhood memoir, Deep South. It is Caldwell's early years in the old segregated, provincial South as the son of a minister. It is a fine, fine book, and elegiac in its tone and simple nobility. It is not a book about religion, but rather one about the dignity and love that can sometimes be found in ordinary, unassuming people
Don't get me wrong. The book is very well written but I'm not sure of the author's intentions. Early on it became apparent that his portrayal of the Lester family is exaggerated to the point of being a caricature. You can call it a work of black comedy but, if so, it is still mean spirited. I can understand why people were offended when Tobacco Road was first published.
Rating: 3* of five
The Book Description: University of Georgia Press's sales copy--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
My Review: Ye gods and little fishes! Talk about "been down so long it looks like up to me!"
A shockingly honest book when it was published in 1932, it's still a picture that comparatively rich urban Americans need to see. The details have changed only a little in 80 years. This kind of poverty not only still exists, but these horrific racial prejudices do too. Read Knockemstiff and The Galaxie and Other Rides and American Salvage for the modern-day honest storytellers mining the same vein of American life. Winter's Bone is its direct descendant! So many of the works I've labeled hillbilly noir...and this is the granddaddy of 'em all. I loved the fact that it was so grim when I first read it as an angry, angsty teen, and it still, or again, aroused my loathing and ire when re-read last year at 52.
I can't remember not thinking that people were vile, irredeemable scum, and reading books like this taught me I wasn't the first to have this insight. Even the best are brought low by the vicious kicks of a merciless gawd. They keep going to church, though, to get kicked again...ultimately the solace of "at least we're not black" (though they use the other word I can't stand even to type) isn't enough to overcome the characters' various phobias and anxieties.
This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!
A megaton of misery detonating in your brain, leaving craters a mile wide for compassion to leak out of.
Author: Erskine Caldwell
Genre: American Fiction
Publisher: New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons
Date: 1932
Pages: 241
Modern Library: The Board’s List #91
Started: 21 August 2013
I have had this book tucked away on a shelf with its pristine cover for several years now. I used to
Here are a few interesting points about this book and the author:
~ When it came out in 1932 it sold for $2.50.
~ When Caldwell sent his typed final version of the book to Max Perkins at Scribners it was accepted for print within ten days and required no editing. Imagine that – every T crossed on the first go ’round, that’s pretty amazing.
~ Tobacco Road was Caldwell’s first and most renowned novel.
Okay, I’m headed to Georgia to hang out with the Lester family for a while. I’ll check back in later.
You might have noticed that I didn’t chime in part way through this book like I usually do. There was no need because the story line never changes. The Lester family, along with Lov and Sister Bessie are so poverty-stricken that survival is their only thought, well – that and sex. Jeeter Lester is a white share-cropper, and the head of the Lester family that lives along the tobacco road. The story revolves around the happenings at the Lester household and the occasional trip away from the property. The repetitiveness of Caldwell’s writing style reiterates the truth of the Lester’s starvation and desperation over and over again on each of the 241 pages of this book. Caldwell makes you want to keep reading, if for nothing else to see what catastrophe Jeeter’s laziness and lack of common sense will bring upon the family next.
If you need to pound out a classic I do suggest you grab Tobacco Road. It’s sad, it’s short, there is a small amount of humor, and in its own odd way it will keep you interested to the last page. This novel will also give you a good feel for southern literature and what it was like for poor white America during the depression.
Oh, and there are turnips and a couple of cases of vehicular homicide that are sure to please. (In a grotesque sort of way.) Enjoy!
Finished: 31 August 2013
This is a book that’s not easy to pigeonhole, and it’s full of contradictions. It’s
It was like a weird cross of The Grapes of Wrath and A Confederacy of Dunces, except much meaner and stranger. I keep thinking about the book, so I guess it’s getting 4 stars.
The book has been compared to [Mark Twain], but what Twain and also [Herman Charles Boseman] wrote about country folks was truly humorous, perhaps because they had a gram of compassion for their characters.
The Depression, and the hopelessness it engendered, has never been more grimly portrayed, although other stories allow the reader to like to characters at least a little.
Is the story supposed to be funny? Is it a farce? I don't think so. It is not a story about "characters" who do stupid things. It is a story filled with grotesques, and watching them go about their "lives" is truly painful for the reader. There isn't much good you can say about any of them. The only one who has a job is also married to a 12-year old, for instance. The only saving grace is that Caldwell writes well. The story doesn't get bogged down with ridiculous Southern dialect. All the horror just unfolds neatly as you read along.
And horror would be fine if the story had a point. As a Southerner myself, I can't help but feel that Caldwell had the same mixed emotions about the South that many of us do--or maybe Caldwell's weren't mixed at all. There is a hatred and venom that runs through the book that is pretty hard to hide. The fact that Caldwell never lived in the South after reaching manhood tells me that, unlike Faulkner, he was incapable of recognizing both the good and the bad of his native region. Perhaps that is why Faulkner will never be forgotten, and Caldwell, largely, already is.
This still doesn't explain why anyone, Northern or Southern, was so fascinated with this sordid tale. Perhaps in the 1930s, in the midst of depression and hardship, it was a relief to watch a group of people who had it worse--much worse--than the reader.
I was halfway through the book before I stopped to read the small bio, brief description, and critic comments located on the back cover. The New York Herald Tribune claims, “Mr. Caldwell’s humor, like Mark Twain’s, has as its source an imagination that stirs the emotions of the reader.”
Ah, Mark Twain(ish) humor, it is supposed to be funny. That changes everything! The characters and their disregard for human life, other than their own, was a little disheartening to read. Knowing now that it is a farce, allows me to really enjoy the story full of unbelievable characters.
Leading the role for most unbelievable is main character, Jeeter, patriarch of the Lester family. Jeeter is all about Jeeter. He even shoos his own mother from the dinner table. Ada, his wife and producer of 17 children, is a quiet woman, but lately, “hunger has loosened her tongue,” and made her a trite annoying. All of the children except for Dude, 16, and Ellie May, 17, have left home for the big city of Augusta, Georgia and its cotton mills. The youngest child, Pearl, 12, was traded to Lov Bensey for food. Grandmother Lester is allowed to haunt the house as long as she stays out of the way. The family actually wills her to wither and blow away.
The book was originally published in 1932, and the timeline is concurrent with the Depression. The Lesters have become sharecroppers on their own original Lester land after Jeeter squanders their assets with fraudulent home loans. As the story opens the family is subsiding on corn meal, snuff, and chicory, while Grandmother Lester forages off the land.
I am so thankful this book is comedic in nature. Not, laugh-track, ha-ha funny such as Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres, but rather a relief these aren’t real people. The character Elly May Clampett is way more forgiving to the eyes than poor, hair-lipped Ellie May Lester. Oh, and how misleading is the title, where’s the tobacco?