Tobacco Road

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Arnold, Edward T. "Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre". New Georgia Encyclopedia . Retrieved January 13, 2023. I loved Caldwell's writing and will read more books written by him. It was all I expected and more. One of the few times in my time here on goodreads when I feel like writing: OMG. ... OMG, and really meaning it. Erskine Caldwell specialized in portraying misery and wretchedness of man and was a great expert of human distress. Tobacco Road is one of the most effective trips to the bottom of human existence. Collins, Carvel (July 1, 1958). "Erskine Caldwell at Work: A Conversation With Carvel Collins". The Atlantic . 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. Es un viaje a la miseria, la pobreza que amenaza a la familia de Lester Jeter y a la que temen porque les hará inferiores a las familias de negros que les rodean, que habían estado tradicionalmente subordinados a ellos. Heredero de una plantación de algodón que en tiempos fue próspera, ahora Lester y su mujer Ada son meros arrendatarios, aunque se agarran a la esperanza de pedir un crédito para volver a plantar una cosecha. Han tenido 17 hijos, de los cuales sólo quedan en casa Ellie May con su labio leporino y su cuerpo explosivo y Dude, que no tiene una inteligencia normal.Escrita en 1932, en plena Gran Depresión, esta breve y ácida novela refleja el triste destino de los pequeños agricultores arruinados por los cambios económicos que estaban teniendo lugar. 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.

They weren't much on education either with all, I believe, of the nine kids in the family dropping out of school and the girls, I think, marrying while in their mid to late teens. None ever divorced either.I found Jeter Lester to be an unsympathetic character for the most part, until the very end, when Lov gave a kind of eulogy about people who love the land and what they expect from it. This passage gave me a better understanding of Jeter and I read it over and over again. Jeter had had the ambition and life beaten out of him by the breakdown of the only system he had ever known and the final betrayal was that of the land itself. 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? 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. [3] The author clearly was way ahead in his thinking and wrote his stories for many generations later to appreciate and understand. During his own lifetime he was not appreciated. "His first two books, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), made Caldwell famous, but this was not initially due to their literary merit. Both novels depict the South as beset by racism, ignorance, cruelty, and deep social inequalities. They also contain scenes of sex and violence that were graphic for the time. Both books were banned from public libraries and other venues, especially in the South. Caldwell was prosecuted for obscenity, though exonerated."

I have seen Tobacco Road labeled as satire -- and I wondered given the degree of realism present. But then I think of Granny behind the chinaberry trees, Pearl with the almost unnaturally beautiful blond hair, Bessie the lustful preacher woman with "the face" no one can abide, and lastly the car -- the object that both embodies so much emotion and is the "vehicle" for so much pain and evil.

Francis, Leila H. (2010). Erskine Caldwell: A Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses. CreateSpace. ISBN 9781453684368. With that said, it bothers me to hear comments that readers didn’t like the book because it was depressing, sad, dark, and inhumane. Even the word ‘ignorance’ came up; the ignorance of the characters. Daddy’s great grandfather (can't recall how many greats) in the early 1700’s came to America from Lancashire, England, a farming area in northwest U. K. 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. Every year Jeeter thinks “if I can get cotton seeds and guano” everything will be fine. But of course seeds and fertilizer cost money. There’s plenty of hopelessness but no money. And Jeeter continues to await a windfall of some kind.