Description

Franklin Library leather edition of Erskine Caldwell's "Stories," Illustrated by Dennis Lyall, a Limited edition, one of the COLLECTED STORIES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST WRITERS series, published in 1980. Bound in hunter green leather, the book has brown moire silk end leaves, acid-free paper, a satin book marker, hubbed spine, gold gilding on three edges----in near FINE condition---except for imperfection to gilt on fore edge. Erskine Preston Caldwell, who lived from 1903--1987, was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism, and social problems in his native Southern U.S. in novels such as "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre" won him critical acclaim, but also made him controversial among Southerners who felt he was deprecating the people. "Erskine Caldwell. There. We've said it. Not so very long ago any Georgian pronouncing that name might have been run out of the state on a rail. If he were lucky.'' ''Erskine was quite the traveler,'' his third wife, Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, recalled. ''But no matter where he was it was Georgia that lifted his spirit.'' Caldwell's father, Ira Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister, was an itinerant preacher, taking his only son all over Coweta County to recite the New Testament to tenant farmers. As a teenager no job -- or location -- was off limits to Caldwell. He worked on a Gulf of Mexico freighter, was arrested for vagrancy in Bogalusa, La., worked in a Maine bookstore, delivered milk in Washington, jerked orange soda in Philadelphia and stocked glassware in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. ''I knew what I wanted to write and what I wanted to write about,'' he once recalled. ''I wanted to write about the people I knew as they really lived, moved, and talked.'' Caldwell was unafraid to bring crude sexuality and barnyard humor into his fiction. In ''A Lamp for Nightfall'' (1952), Caldwell plunged head first into what the critic W. J. Cash called the ''savage ideal'' of the American South. Caldwell took a jarring road trip throughout rural Georgia, jotting down character sketches of mule-skinners, turnip farmers, midnight gamblers, mulatto whores and pellagra-stricken mothers. Blessed with an ear for dialogue, he developed a cast of grotesques like Jeeter Lester, a cotton farmer who couldn't afford to buy seed; Bessie Rice, a corrupt preacher woman; and Ellie May, a sexually abused 16-year-old. Add to the dysfunctional mix dilapidated houses, lime-rock chips, depleted soil, absentee landlords and a grim determination to never admit defeat, and you get ''Tobacco Road.'' ''Tobacco Road'' became a smash Broadway play; ''God's Little Acre'' sold more than 10 million copies, and by the time of his death in 1987 he had written 25 novels, 12 volumes of nonfiction and more than 150 stories. Caldwell wrote with great sensitivity about the horrors of Jim Crow. Three of his short stories -- ''Candy-Man Beechum,'' ''Savannah River Payday'' and ''Kneel to the Rising Sun''-- are now considered civil rights era classics. Another title that is faring well with Caldwell scholars is ''In Search of Bisco''(1965), a scathing nonfiction journey into the segregationist south of the George Wallace era. ''It was written between the Selma march and passage of the historic civil rights legislation,'' Wayne Mixon, a history professor at Augusta State University, said. ''It's a moving plea for the South -- which he loved -- to do better.'' his region. 313 pages. I offer Combined shipping.