Tobacco Road

Product Information

Jeeter Lester could have moved away to the cotton mills, like everybody else, when the soil was so depleted of nutrition that neither tobacco nor cotton could grow in it anymore. But Jeeter was a man of the land. He would rather dream of trying to plant a cotton crop than go to Heaven. He was made to farm. He couldn't farm, due to his financial situation, but he was a religious man. God would provide, even if Jeeter sometimes had to steal sweet potatoes and turnips from the neighboring places, or even rob his son-in-law, until there was nothing left to steal. Ada, his wife, needed snuff to kill the hunger pains. He was unable to provide that. Neither could he buy her a decent dress to die in one day. Not that it was a priority for the head of the family. His needs came first, and he was not going to die and have the mice eat half his face away in his coffin, like it happened with his father. No, he had clear instructions on how he was to be handled when his time would come. Ada would just have to wait her turn. 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. 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. I have underlined what I question. Does poverty do that to the extent that it is drawn in this book? I do not equate poverty with stupidity. The Lesters had seventeen kids. Five died. When the novel begins only two (Dude and Ellie May, an eighteen-year-old with an extremely ugly cleft lip) remain still at home with mom (Ada), dad (Jeeter) and grandma. The son Dude who is sixteen gets married to a women preacher named Bessie Rice. She is thirty-nine. She has a deformed face. These six individuals and a few others are drawn as imbeciles, as animals, as depraved, crude human beings. Religion is used as an excuse - for laziness, for doing nothing, for accepting fate. The only sign of hope are the ten children who have left. Little is known or said about them. The little that is said draws them too as unforgiving, cruel and uncompassionate individuals. Caldwell, Erskine (16 May 2017). Three Novels: Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, and Place Called Estherville. Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1-5040-4547-6– via google books.

If you're looking for an off-beat classic, or depression-era literature that isn't too depressing, Tobacco Road is a great choice.With cumulative sales of 10 million [9] and 14 million copies, [10] respectively, Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre rank as two of the best-selling American novels, all-time, with the former being adapted into a 1933 play that set a Broadway record for consecutive performances, since surpassed. 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? Biography". John Wade. Archived from the original on September 29, 2011 . Retrieved September 29, 2011. In Palatka, Florida, 36 miles from where I live in St. Augustine, the Latimer Arts Center (Prairie School of architecture and quite lovely) Larimer Arts Center served as the county library from 1930 until 1992. Atop the arched entranceway are the phrases “Ignorance Breeds Crime” and “Knowledge is Power.” These two phrases have always intrigued me especially since I never thought of Palatka as the center of knowledge in northeast Florida. (In part, I must admit that comment is due to a local rivalry.)

Erskine Calwell is considered a naturalistic writer the definition being “characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings.” 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. 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 think every book I've ever read that was placed during the 1930’s depression had a dark tone. The depression was not the best of times for America’s economy (or the world for that matter) and of course, it's citizens. In Jeeter Lester’s case, the landowner, “Captain John,” got out of the farming business and left the community, and no one in town will lend Jeeter the money or supplies to lay in a fresh crop. Yet Jeeter insists that he should be able to farm in the old way, and not have to go work in a mill as many other farmers whom he knows have done: “The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me” (p. 27).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] Caldwell occasionally steps somewhat clumsily into the narrative to discuss his message more boldly. Otherwise he lets the story provide the details of the rich in power, tenant farmers set loose with nothing, the land being lost to poor use practices over generations. The next day, Jeeter talks Sister Bessie and Dude into taking him to Augusta to sell some firewood. They struggle during the trip to get there because they forgot to put oil in the car and they have damaged the engine. Once in Augusta, they cannot find anyone to buy the wood and end up selling the car's spare tire for extra cash. It becomes late, so they decide to stay in a hotel. Sister Bessie is pulled from the room and offered other places to sleep, finding herself sharing beds with several other men. The tobacco road that passes by the rural Georgia home of Jeeter Lester and his family, in Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road, may speak to the prosperous colonial history of tobacco farming. But by the early-20th-century setting of this novel, the tobacco market has long since gone bust, and the cotton market seems likely to follow. And impoverished small farmers like Jeeter Lester, sharecroppers who are trying to make a living through tenant farming, are trapped in a system where they are bound to lose – even if they don’t know that they’re trapped.

a b Trueheart, Charles (March 1, 1987). "Erskine Caldwell The Final Chapter". Washington Post . Retrieved October 1, 2022. The land kept the Lester family in food, clothing, and shelter for generations but when the land gradually lost the needed nutrients it grew less and less. A much larger land area (a plantation, can’t recall) belonging to the Lesters was sold off gradually by each generation. Over time the land simply gave out from being overused with the nutrients gradually depleted from the planting of tobacco and later, cotton. The Lesters were a family who were caught up in the end of an era - the era of sharecropping, brought on by a sea change in farming practices and the Depression (anyone see any parallels here?). Yes, they were ignorant, but that is not to say they were stupid. They were facing the real possibility of starvation because the only life they had ever known had been taken away from them. They were desperate and concerned only with survival. Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil. Erskine Caldwell does a commendable job of emphasizing how socioeconomic hardships negatively impact the psyche and relationships of everyday people. He encourages the reader to tap into their sociological imagination and discover the underlying institutional problems that heighten personal issues. The Lesters become increasingly demoralized as they try to make sense of the uncertainty faced. As a result, the family descends into mayhem, which causes separation and death for some relatives. Update this section!In 1941, Caldwell reported from the USSR for Life magazine, CBS radio and the newspaper PM. [14] He wrote movie scripts for about five years. Caldwell wrote articles from Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the North American Newspaper Alliance. [14] Personal life [ edit ] Jeeter sets a fire to burn off broom sedge and hopes somehow to find enough credit to farm his land that spring. As Jeeter and Ada sleep, sparks from the fire ignite the shingles of their house, which burns to the ground, killing them in their sleep. As the novel closes, Dude makes his first mention of working: He voices the same thoughts of plowing the Lester land that Jeeter had expressed throughout the story, indicating that the vicious cycle in which poor Southern farmers such as the Lesters are trapped continues.