Background
Erskine was born on December 17, 1903 in Moreland, Georgia, United States. Son of Ira Sylvester and Caroline Preston (Bell) Caldwell.
Erskine was born on December 17, 1903 in Moreland, Georgia, United States. Son of Ira Sylvester and Caroline Preston (Bell) Caldwell.
Caldwell's schooling was fragmentary; he attended high school sporadically and took college courses at the University of Pennsylvania, at Erskine College, in South Carolina, and at the University of Virginia. As a young man, he worked in Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as a mill laborer, farmhand, cotton picker, cook, stagehand in a burlesque house, and book reviewer. In 1925 he left the University of Virginia to become a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, and he married the first of his four wives, Helen Lannigan, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
Erskine Caldwell settled in Maine in 1926, determined to work seriously as a writer of fiction. Fame arrived with Tobacco Road (1932), a highly controversial novel whose title grew to be a byword for rural squalor and degradation. A dramatization of Tobacco Road by Jack Kirkland in 1934 ran for seven and a half years on the New York stage and became a staple of the American theatre, with its tragicomic picture of Jeeter Lester, his family, and his neighbours. Caldwell’s reputation as a novelist largely rests on Tobacco Road and on God’s Little Acre (1933), another best-selling novel featuring a cast of hopelessly poor and degenerate whites in the rural South. Among his other more important works are Trouble in July (1940); the episodic narrative Georgia Boy (1943), a well-told story of boyhood; the literary autobiography Call It Experience (1951); and In Search of Bisco (1965).
Caldwell provided the text and his wife-to-be, Margaret Bourke-White, provided the photographs for a powerful documentary book about the rural South entitled You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). They collaborated on two more such picture-and-text books on eastern European countries. Caldwell worked overseas as a journalist during World War II, wrote screenplays in Hollywood, and continued to produce works of fiction and remembrance in the latter part of his career.
Erskine Caldwell was married to Helen Lannigan. They had three children, Erskine Preston, Dabney Withers, Janet. His second marriage was to Margaret Bourke-White. His third marriage was to June Johnso. They had one child, Jay Erskine. His fouthmarriage was to Virginia Moffett Fletcher.