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...
Portraying a region steeped religious piety and ritual, excess and prejudice, "Deep South" is a product both of Erskine Caldwell the storyteller an...
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 oversexed 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 furor flagged, Caldwell was relegated...
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 ...
