Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit

This study of Erskine Caldwell is the first comprehensive investigation of all the novels, short stories, and nonfiction of this intriguing southern writer. Once considered in France to be one of the 'big five, ' along with Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, Caldwell was praised and honored throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan during the first half of this century. But in his native land, and especially in his native South, he was more often an object of embarrassment, controversy, and, ultimately, neglect. Sylvia Jenkins Cook considers the sources of Caldwell's fame and disrepute by examining his simultaneous attraction to what was most ludicrous, vulgar, and irrational in human nature and what was most cruel and unjust in human society.Cook, Sylvia Jenkins is the author of 'Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit', published 1991 under ISBN 9780807116937 and ISBN 0807116939.