Tobacco Road

by Erskine Caldwell

Unsentimentally realistic, this classic novel is a reflection of the effects of poverty on tenant farmers in the South during the Great Depression. It focuses on the Lester family, former cotton farmers who continue to live on their ancestors' plantation even though it has long ceased to be prosperous. Jeeter and Ada Lester have 17 children, two of whom still live at Ellie May, their only unmarried daughter who has a cleft lip, and Dude, their youngest son who is mentally handicapped. The family's antics, while at times vile and perverse, depict the racism and moral ambiguity that existed among some impoverished Southerners at that time and represent Erskine Caldwell's critique of the failed economic system and its consequences.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Southern Gothic, Southern, Literature, American

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was holding the region up to ridicule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erskine_...

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erskine Caldwell specialized in portraying misery and wretchedness of man and was a great expert of human distress. Tobacco Road is one of the most effective trips to the bottom of human existence.

When his father died, what was left of the Lester lands and debts was willed to Jeeter. The first thing that happened was the foreclosure of the mortgage. In order to satisfy the creditors, all the timber was cut, and another large portion of the land was sold. Two years later Jeeter found himself so heavily in debt that he did not own a single acre of land, or even a tenant house, after the claims had been settled. The man who purchased the farm at the sheriff’s sale was Captain John Harmon. Captain John allowed Jeeter and his family to live in one of the houses, and to work for him on shares. That was ten years before the World War.

What is primary: poverty or depravity? Actually, it is a vicious circle – poverty aggravates depravity and depravity exacerbates poverty and the process continues until human being is reduced to the bestial condition. And then man begins to exist ruled by animal instincts and physiological needs.

From that time forward, Jeeter had sunk each year into a poverty more bitter than that of the year before. The culmination had apparently been reached when Captain John sold the mules and other stock and moved to Augusta. There was then to be no more two-thirds’ share of a year’s labor coming to Jeeter, and there was never again to be credit for food and snuff and other necessities at the stores in Fuller. With him, Captain John took his credit. Jeeter did not know what to do. Without snuff and food, life seemed not worth living any longer.

Once man starts falling into the abyss, there is no way to stop…

[Justin Tate · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times laugh-out-loud, slap your knee hilarious, and at times truly heart-breaking. Of course we're dealing with depression-era poverty, so it shouldn't all be a jolly good time. Caldwell's witty cast of characters allows for this unique experience of laughing until you cry and crying because you laugh. Not surprising that the stage adaptation was such a hit. Although it does surprise me that as recently as 2011 it's the the second-longest running non-musical ever on Broadway.

Modern readers may be accidentally horrified by the over-the-top racism and sexism, but it is important to understand these cringe-worthy moments were specifically written to be outrageous, even by 1932 standards. The whole thing is a not-so-subtle jab at backwards Southern thinking and ignorance.

If you're looking for an off-beat classic, or depression-era literature that isn't too depressing, Tobacco Road is a great choice.

Disclaimer: I listened to the audio version as read by Mark Hammer. Mark's performance is superb and probably increased the enjoyability by 1000%.

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solo unas pocas palabras para invitarles a que disfruten de esta novela de Erskine Caldwell, tan amarga como divertida.

Uno lee y se ríe y se indigna con lo que lee y se vuelve a reír y se indigna por haberse reído y se vuelve a reír y a indignarse y a reír y…sí, a veces se le hiela a uno la sonrisa en la boca de tanta indignación ante un personaje tan corrosivo como este Jeeter “Homer Simpson” Lester, protagonista indiscutible de esta adictiva novela que se lee de una sentada.

[``Laurie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Back in the early 1980's, when I lived in Augusta, Georgia, there was a country backroad outside of town called Tobacco Road. I had heard of the book with this title and I wondered if this was just a coincidence or was this the setting for the book Tobacco Road.

Curious, I checked the book out of the library and found out that yes indeed, this road was the setting for this unrelenting tale of horror.

I didn't realize at the time that Caldwell wrote this book in order to justify eugenics and the cleansing of such as these poor southerners and others of their ilk who weren't as able and intelligent as Caldwell.

Caldwell tries with all his heart to make these characters little more than animals and does an incredibly good job.

So if you're in favor of genetic cleansing by all means read this book; otherwise, don't even think about polluting your precious brain cells with such garbage.

[Melanie Hierholzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am amazed that so many people on this website just did not get this book. Perhaps it has to do with their innate feelings about people from the South. Maybe they should look to own their prejudices.

This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. While there were certain humorous passages, I did not find this book in the least bit funny, and I cannot understand the thinking of anyone who did.

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.

Of course they made silly choices, but they were aided in this by unscrupulous people such as the Captain, the car salesman, and the "hotel" manager. They did not know any better and were taken advantage of because of it.

I found Jeter Lester to be an unsympathetic character for the most part, until the very end, when Lov gave a kind of eulogy about people who love the land and what they expect from it. This passage gave me a better understanding of Jeter and I read it over and over again. Jeter had had the ambition and life beaten out of him by the breakdown of the only system he had ever known and the final betrayal was that of the land itself.

Altruism and high moral standards come easily in a wealthy society. This book points out what can happen to the people who are left behind.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He sometimes said it was partly his own fault, but he believed steadfastly that his position had been brought about by other people.”
― Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road



Sometimes, when I'm unable to understand Georgia's ability to support and defend Judge Roy Moore, it helps to read a little bit of Erskine Caldwell. 'Tobacco Road' reminds me a bit of Hemingway, a bit of Twain, and a bit of Steinbeck. It is both a social justice novel and a darkly comic novel that paints the ugly corners of human poverty and depravity. The Lesters are a family of white sharecropers that are basically rotting into the earth. Social and economic norms and even the family are lost. Religion is abused. Even new cars are abused and quickly swallowed by the Earth. The land is fallow, burned, and everything is going to Hell.

It is a good thing the novel was so short, because it was painful to read.

[Phoenix Perpetuale · Rating 4 out of 5]

History and life

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell is a fascinating story about American life. However, represented life is not the one that we know nowadays. Eating only rooted vegetables, mainly turnips, people manage to be positive. I was fascinated by this book which I listened to on Audible. It was narrated with a proper tone to the region. This narration gave me the perspective of people. How they live, what their mood was. I would recommend Tabacco Road to listen to people learning English because of different pronunciations.
Also, a fact that drove my attention was a marriage between a mature woman who happens to be a widow and a sixteen-year-old teenager. People questioned that, suggesting their viewpoints. However, the dilemma is not unknown today. We all are against teenagers' relationships with adults, but we all adore yellow pages about celebrities half age or more partners.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably thirty years ago, if not longer, I read the play based on this novel and until now that's all I knew of the book, besides its being steeped in controversy. I understand why it is, but I think those who take offense are looking at only one part of the picture. If you believe Caldwell is mocking the poor sharecroppers, then what is he saying about the townspeople who mercilessly ridicule them, and in their hearing, also cheating them of the little bit of money they might have? None of that was humorous to me, though I have a feeling some found it so.

The Lester family is starving -- literally -- and the little they might acquire is consumed by a hierarchy, a survival of the fittest. Grandmother Lester knows she is expendable and keeps out of the way. For all the Lester females, silence is power to a certain extent. Except for the once-silent mother Ada and Bessie, who is not technically a Lester, I don't believe any of them speak; but they watch, and act when they can. The father Jeeter does not act, but he does talk, repeating himself all the time: No one is listening.

The book alternates at times between what comes across as almost slapstick (not something I care for, but well done here) and then musings about the Lester family history and their attachment to the land. I felt the last chapter was an elevation in both content and prose style, the perfect coda.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Born in rural west Georgia, Caldwell was the son of a preacher whose ministry took him all over the South. Educated by his mother, a former schoolteacher, Caldwell observed closely the depths of the rural Southern poverty that he observed in his family’s travels through the region, and as he grew into manhood he came to believe that the American economic system was unfairly set against the poor. Tobacco Road, with its unflinching portrayal of Southern rural poverty and its consequences, reflects Caldwell’s life experiences and his political beliefs.

The status of Tobacco Road as a novel capable of scandalizing the conservative U.S. readership of the 1930’s is apparent from the novel’s first page, when the narrator mentions, with regard to the character of Lov Bensey, that “Lov’s wife was Jeeter Lester’s youngest daughter, Pearl. She was only twelve years old the summer before when he married her” (p. 1). The novel, thus beginning with the giving of a girl child in marriage to a full-grown man, descends from there into one sordid and painful detail after another.

Jeeter spends the first couple of chapters of the novel concocting a scheme to steal from Lov – from his own son-in-law – a sack of turnips that Lov is carrying past the house. The plot to steal the turnips and the successful theft of the turnips take up so much novelistic time and space that the reader gets the sense that Caldwell wants to convey the slow passage of time in the Georgia community of Tobacco Road. This is a place where nothing much ever happens, but Caldwell makes that “nothing” as interesting as it is depressing.

It soon emerges that Jeeter Lester is a tenant farmer – a sharecropper who has worked land that is not his, under a contract to procure the necessary farming supplies from the land’s owner, and to share with the owner part of the crop that he has harvested by the end of the year. History records that the system was stacked against the tenant farmers – most of whom, sooner or later, became trapped in a state of virtual peasantry, without money in their pockets or land to call their own.

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).

The reader is likely to be appalled by Jeeter Lester’s insistence that doing nothing – squatting on a piece of land, perpetually on the edge of starvation – is somehow better than taking a paying job. Yet that agrarian ideal of holding to the traditional farming way of life is deeply held by a number of the characters in Tobacco Road. Late in the novel, Lov reflects on how and why he might be disposed to agree with Jeeter about holding out for farming rather than joining the exodus of former farmers leaving the farms to seek work in the mills: “The mills is sort of like automobiles – they’re all right to fool around in and have a good time in, but they don’t offer no love like the ground does. The ground sort of looks out after the people who keeps their feet on it. When people stand on planks in buildings all the time, and walk around on hard streets, the ground sort of loses interest in the human” (p. 239).

To call Jeeter Lester uninformed would be an understatement. His lack of education and initiative is complemented by a tendency toward indulging in situational ethics, as shown after he has stolen that bag of turnips from his own son-in-law Lov:

Down in the thicket, hidden from the house and road by the four-foot wall of brown broom-sedge, Jeeter’s conscience began to bother him. His hunger had been abated temporarily, and his overalls pockets were filled with turnips, but the slowly formed realization that he had stolen his son-in-law’s food sickened his body and soul. He had stolen food before, food and everything else he had had opportunity to take, but each time, as now, he regretted what he had done until he could convince himself that he had not done anything so terribly wrong. Sometimes he could do this in a few minutes; at other times, it was days, and even weeks, before he was satisfied that God had forgiven him and would not punish him too much. (p. 52)

Caldwell spends a great deal of time analyzing the reasons behind Jeeter Lester’s sloth; the narrator states at one point that “There were always well-developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them. One day led to the next, and it was much more easy to say he would wait until tomorrow. When that day arrived, he invariably postponed action until a more convenient time. Things had been going on in that easy way for almost a lifetime now” (p. 79). Among the “things” that he never seems to get around to is seeking reconstructive surgery for his daughter Ellie May, whose cleft lip interferes with whatever marital prospects she might otherwise have.

Yet Jeeter’s laziness may speak to his discontent with the lot that life has given him. Caldwell adds later that “Jeeter postponed nearly everything a man could think of, but when it came to plowing the land and planting cotton, he was as persistent as any man could be about such things. He started out each day with his enthusiasm at fever pitch, and by night he was as determined as ever to find a mule he could borrow and a merchant who would give him credit for seed-cotton and guano” (p. 103). It is as if Jeeter is willing to work – but only on the terms that he finds honorable as a farming man.

Caldwell offers some commentary on the sharecropping system of the South at that time, stating at one point that “An intelligent employment of his land, stocks, and implements would have enabled Jeeter, and scores of others who had become dependent upon Captain John, to raise crops for food, and crops to be sold at a profit. Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all” (p. 82). Such critiques of Southern sharecropping may have done as much to make Tobacco Road controversial as the sexual references that got Tobacco Road banned in some localities, and even made Caldwell a target of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Jeeter, ever in search of deliverance from his miserable situation, is hoping for help from his son Tom, who left the tobacco road and built a successful living elsewhere. Yet Jeeter is dubious regarding his prospects of gaining a loan or gift of money from Tom, stating that “it sometimes looks like a rich man will never help the poor; whereas the poor will give away everything they has to help somebody who ain’t got nothing. That’s how it looks to me. Don’t seem like it ought to be that way, but I reckon the rich ain’t got no time to fool with us poor folks” (p. 99). The reader senses at once that Jeeter's hopes of receiving help from Tom are not likely to be fulfilled.

Indeed, throughout Tobacco Road the members of the Lester family experience one disastrous misfortune after another. Lester’s teenage son Dude is coerced into marriage by a preacher named Sister Bessie Rice, who like Ellie May has a facial disfigurement (she was born without cartilage in her nose). Bessie and Dude buy a car with money from an insurance settlement, and they almost immediately begin to destroy the car through their inability to maintain or care for it at even the most basic level. Worse yet, they crash into a wagon driven by an African American, because Dude wasn’t looking where he was going. The man in the wagon, we are told, fell to the ground, was crushed by the wagon, and was last seen motionless, looking up at the sky with his eyes wide open. Dude says that “He looked like he was dead”, and Jeeter replies indifferently, using a racial slur, to the effect that blacks in that part of the South “will get killed. Looks like there ain’t no way to stop it” (p. 158). Racism, like poverty, is a central part of what is holding people down throughout this region.

Sister Bessie’s reflections on her preaching vocation show that the shared religion of the South is as unthinking as the region’s economic practices and racial policies. She says that “Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.” She adds that “Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things” (p. 209). It is religion as entertainment on the level of professional wrestling, with a strong focus on bad guys that one can root against.

Jeeter finds that he’s once again lived through the season for beginning spring planting without beginning to plant anything, and reflects sadly upon his lot: “He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life” (p. 228). And one last attempt on his part to go through the motions of preparing the ground for spring planting results in one final tragedy for the Lester family.

I read Tobacco Road while traveling in Georgia. Today, the city of Hinesville, home to Fort Stewart and the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division (the “Rock of the Marne”), is a pleasant place with a lovely little downtown and all the same chain stores and chain restaurants that one would expect to find in any American city of 33,000 people. But one does not have to travel very far outside Hinesville to find rural poverty that, if not as severe as what Caldwell presents in his novel, still dramatizes the depths of the economic disparity that seems to be increasing across this country at this point in our history.

Today, Caldwell may not be mentioned in the same breath with the greatest writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance – William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty – but he wins grudging respect for the sheer tenacity with which he sets forth the crushing poverty, both temporal and spiritual, of his characters’ lives. One critic wrote that “what William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records.” Caldwell is true to his artistic vision – even if that vision is a singularly depressing one.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

BLURB
"Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them."

COMMENT
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.

He was a very sinful man. Probably the most sinful man in the country, he claims, with some of the neighboring children bearing his resemblance, and the new couple who moved in years ago ...Ada did not want him to finish his sentences, when he got this excited about his legacy. Seventeen legitimate children born by Ada later, with twelve surviving, he was a man who knew how to plant seed and let them grow. He did not see any other future for himself or his land, than planting as much seed in any way he could. That is God's plan for a man like Jeeter Lester.

Occassionaly his conscience would remind him of his sins. Fortunately, there was neighbors like, Bessie, who could save his soul.

“The Lord told me to come to the Lester house,” the woman preacher said. “I was at home sweeping out the kitchen when He came to me and said, ‘Sister Bessie, Jeeter Lester is doing something evil. You go to his place and pray for him right now before it’s too late, and try to make him give up his evil goings-on.’ I looked right back at the Lord, and said, ‘Lord, Jeeter Lester is a powerful sinful man, but I’ll pray for him until the devil goes clear back to hell.’ That’s what I told Him, and here I is. I came to pray for you and yours, Jeeter Lester. Maybe it ain’t too late yet to get on the good side of the Lord. It’s people like you who ought to be good, instead of letting the devil make you do all sorts of sinful things.”

“I knowed the good Lord wouldn’t let me slip and fall in the devil’s hands!” Jeeter shouted, dancing around Bessie’s chair. “I knowed it! I knowed it! I always been on God’s side, even when things was the blackest, and I knowed He’d jerk me out of hell before it was too late. I ain’t no sinner by nature, Sister Bessie. It’s just the old devil who’s always hounding me to do a little something bad. But I ain’t going to do it. I want to go to heaven when I die.”

Shocking, graphic, heartbreaking, bleak, often humorous, in a brilliant way. I can clearly see why Erskine Caldwell is regarded as a literary giant in the American psyche. He not only captured a situation completely with his observational and journalistic skills, in his graphic realism, but he also captured the heart and souls of the people he exposed to the world in their own language.

I couldn't decide if the dire poverty and destitution could be termed a tragicomedy or not. There was singular moments in which only humor could deflate a situation, but the underlining message was a tragic one. In other instances I was shocked to the core with the cold, inhumane actions of the family members who have lost their sense of dignity and compassion a generation or two ago.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt had the same effect on me than this book. I laughed and cried simultaneously. Nobody or nothing in the book endeared me to the situation. Yet, I could not help but keep on reading, hoping that something good will happen for the family.

The author, in an almost cold calculating voice and graphic detail, described the lives of the Lester family; the situation of dehumanized paupers, the sharecroppers, living on the isolated back-roads of America. He meticulously painted the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. But behind the ruthless exposure, hides the compassionate soul of someone who deeply cared and wanted their story told as part of the social history of a country. These people were exploited to the last quarter in their pocket by the affluent members of society. The Lesters, and all the hundreds of families like them, were regarded as the scavengers of humanity. Yet, he managed to give them a warm, endearing voice in which to tell their stories themselves.

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."

It takes a few hours to spend with a family like the Lesters, reading their story. It takes a lifetime to appreciate the message behind it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[Cathy DuPont · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.)


Doorway of Larimer Arts Center

With that said we know that reading is an education. Reading allows a person to learn about anything and everything. This knowledge can be obtained at your local library where readers can find information at their fingertips which, as readers, we already know.


Larimer Arts Center, Reid St., Palatka, Florida

With that said, it bothers me to hear comments that readers didn’t like the book because it was depressing, sad, dark, and inhumane. Even the word ‘ignorance’ came up; the ignorance of the characters.

There are many other adjectives to describe what’s been said by Goodreads.com readers about Tobacco Road but I agree with Melanie Hierholzer who says “I am amazed that so many people on this website just did not get this book. Here's Melanie's excellent review: Tobacco Road. Knowing the subject of the book and early in my reading, I was looking for a reader who I thought voiced an opinion that might be similar to mine. Thankfully I found Melanie's review and we had a great conversation.

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.

Erskine Calwell is considered a naturalistic writer the definition being “characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings.”

The Theme of the Book is The Land (My opinion, of course.)

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 land was all the Lester family had known as poor and illiterate farmers. (Of course this was prior to any Headstart programs, Food Stamp Programs, any governmental assistance programs whatsoever.)

Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of the family, would not and could not fathom working in the city in one of the cotton mills. The cotton mill was where their neighbors migrated to make a living. But the Lesters wouldn't leave the only thing they had ever known which was farming the land.

Every year Jeeter thinks “if I can get cotton seeds and guano” everything will be fine. But of course seeds and fertilizer cost money. There’s plenty of hopelessness but no money. And Jeeter continues to await a windfall of some kind.

Talking to the shopkeeper asking for credit, Jeeter says “…You storekeepers won’t let us have no more credit since Captain John (now owner of the land) left, and what is we going to do? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and my folks if the rich don’t stop bleeding us. They've got all the money, holding it in the banks, and they won’t lend it out unless a man will cut off this arms and leave them there for security.” The Lesters blame the bankers and the shopkeepers for their plight, their inability to farm the land.

Boiled fatback once a day I guess can be a little filling when you add some cornbread. No, not cornbread, cottonmeal bread because cottonmeal stretches further in the household. And lordy, lordy, don’t be late for dinner otherwise the table is empty; none of that “let’s save some for Dude” the 16 year-old son in the family or Grandma Lester. It’s every man for himself. Grandma Lester does her best to stay invisible since she’s the oldest and least productive. She knows her death is just one less mouth to feed.

And they all slowly starve to death. The basics of survival have kicked in. This, I think, is what alarmed readers...that people could be both this selfish and this ignorant.

Everyone is unattractive, except 12 year-old yellow-haired and lovely Pearl Lester Bensey who is married to Jeeter’s friend Lov Bensey. Ok, let’s call it what it is, everyone seems to be ugly but it’s all ugly; the land, the situation, their rag clothes, the corn husk beds, the dirty sheets. Everything is ugly and damaged just like the land.

The one thing Jeeter and his wife, Ada, accept is death. They tell anyone who will listen what they want to wear new and stylish clothes when they’re “laid out.” Although it doesn't mention it, at the time when someone died they were placed in open wooden coffins in the main room of the house and relatives and friends came to pay their respects. In death Jeeter and Ada thought and wanted to look nice when they passed and were laid out.

No, the book was not depressing to me personally although it was a depressing subject. The book was about a hard life that was slow to disappear.

Hey, this is America. We can read what we like. If I don't like a book, I won't read it.

This book may not be for you and yes, you might find it depressing. If so put it down and pick up Mary Poppins, something that will make you happy.

I loved Caldwell's writing and will read more books written by him. It was all I expected and more.

My Family Story
Years ago I was visiting Daddy's birthplace (at home) on a cotton farm in southwestern North Carolina, between Hayesville, North Carolina and Hiwassee, Georgia. I was sitting on the steps of Philadelphia Church with my cousin Rex and I asked him why Grandma and Grandpa moved around so much? He laughed asking me “you don’t know?” No, I didn't know. Rex said they were itinerant sharecroppers and they had to move where land was more fertile, where their crops would grow to feed the family. (I’m from a small (pop. 13,900) Florida city in north Florida, not a farmer for sure, so this came as news to me, the why of their moving frequently.)

The one thing I did remember from visiting Grandma and Grandpa was that they never lived in any house where there was indoor plumbing. There was always an outhouse. To get to every home they lived in that I recall, there were always many switchbacks up a mountain.

I recall Daddy saying he looked at the rear end of a jackass from sunup until sundown for so many years he couldn't count.

They weren't much on education either with all, I believe, of the nine kids in the family dropping out of school and the girls, I think, marrying while in their mid to late teens. None ever divorced either.

Daddy said he never had a 'real' toothbrush until he joined the service when he was 17. (He made them from a twig of a specific tree branch by flaring and separating one end to act as bristles. He showed us how he did it on one visit to see Grandma.)


Grandma and Grandpa, Mary Jane Gibson Ledford and Mark Ledford ---Hard working people, maybe in early 40's?

In talking to Rex and his wife Marie after reading the book, Rex said that they saw the movie Tobacco Road and Grandma and Grandpa’s life and those of the nine kids (Daddy being the seventh, Rex’s Dad the oldest) wasn't much different than the Lester’s life as portrayed in the movie. Hummm, was my only response.

Daddy’s great grandfather (can't recall how many greats) in the early 1700’s came to America from Lancashire, England, a farming area in northwest U. K.

He, John, was 15 and came with two older brothers. At the time many immigrants got passage to America as indentured servants. John farmed for the boat/plantation owner for seven years and was a free man at age 22. No surprise that he farmed for his service.


Me and my brother on Grandma’s porch looking like we fit in, barefoot, of course

When we visited Grandma, Grandpa and our aunts, uncles and cousins, they thought we were rich because we lived in Florida. They thought anyone who lived in Florida had to be rich. We look rich, huh?

How My Family and My GR Friend Jeff Keeten's Family May Have Fit Together
In some specific reviews my friend Jeff Keeten has written that his cousin, in researching their family, found their linage includes the Royal Dynasty of the House of Plantagenet. My response has been jokingly “my kinfolk were outside your castle in the rain planting, then picking and pulling food from the ground to place on the table of your family. I said it tongue-in-cheek. As a joke, you know and now it doesn't seem too far-fetched. Huh? Jeff? :D

Wish I had read this many years ago, however it's unlikely I would have much family background which made me relate to the book more than I probably would otherwise.

And no, you don't have to have itinerant farmers as relatives to praise the excellent historical writing of Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell, in my mind, a classic.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second Reading.

Nathaniel Rich writes on "The Daily Beast" website, "As a comedy, Tobacco Road is a modest failure; as a tragedy, it is an abject failure" and that the novel is "as indelible as a freak show or car crash." Dwight Garner on the "Slate" website called it "a greasy hairball of a novel....one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the American South." Both writers, however, proceed to give the novel a generally positive review. Their conflicted response is typical of both critics and readers.

Experts, however, have ranked it as one of the hundred most significant novels written in English in the 20th century. And, especially after its success as a Broadway play, the novel eventually sold ten million copies.

Rich goes on to say that Erskine Caldwell is a "progenitor of what could be called the degenerate school of American fiction," which I suppose could be called a subgenre of the so-called grit-lit genre. At any rate, it seems that a straight line can be drawn from Caldwell to writers such as Harry Crews, who also attempted to combine tragedy and comedy in their novels.

Tobacco Road, published in 1932, was meant to be a work of social protest, a condemnation of poverty among the poor whites of the Deep South. John Steinbeck wrote about some of the same issues a few years later in The Grapes of Wrath. But it is only on the surface that the two books are similar. Unlike Steinbeck, Caldwell refused to resort to sentimentality or to imbue his characters with any degree of dignity in coping with their suffering. Other than poverty and being dispossessed of their land, Caldwell's Lesters share very little in common with Steinbeck's Joads.

Most readers, and I include myself, struggle with Caldwell's depiction of the Lesters as being "ignorant, selfish, crude, sexually promiscuous, indecent, but also comic figures." Caldwell seems to simultaneously sympathize with his characters while at the same time maintaining a disdainful attitude toward them. The book is a call for social action to combat poverty, but one that provides no solutions.

Caldwell claimed that he wrote the novel as "a rebuke of the perfumed 'moonlight and magnolias' literature of the South." Well, it was that.

And there is this, too: it was edited by Maxwell Perkins; William Faulkner and Malcolm Cowley admired the book; and Saul Bellow thought Caldwell should have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a harsh story of hard times in a hard place. Though the Lesters definitely appear to be more a type than a real family (in fact no one seems particularly real) rural poverty certainly was (and still is) real. There are many messages here about the loss of land, the state of tenant farmers, etc, but there are also messages about personal responsibility.

I have seen Tobacco Road labeled as satire -- and I wondered given the degree of realism present. But then I think of Granny behind the chinaberry trees, Pearl with the almost unnaturally beautiful blond hair, Bessie the lustful preacher woman with "the face" no one can abide, and lastly the car -- the object that both embodies so much emotion and is the "vehicle" for so much pain and evil.

So I guess satire is there after all.

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.

While I agree that government and ownership policy were long to blame, I also find individual actions (or inactions) very much at fault and Caldwell seems to point to that also. But isn't that the problem in much of life -- the complexity of much of life -- which requires us to think beyond easy solutions or quick fixes. Jeeter planned the same action every year with every year the same non-result. Caldwell would lile us to look further, I believe.

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - A downcast story about a poor white sharecropper family set in the years before the Depression. Grandmother Lester, Jeeter, the father, and Ada, the mother, eighteen-year-old daughter Ellie May, sixteen-year-old son Dude, and twelve-year-old daughter Pearl sold to Lov, the neighbor, (to become his wife) are all members of this poverty-stricken family, fallen on the worst of hard times. They have nine more children that are grown and have left home, but can't remember all their names. Jeeter sells Pearl for quilts, cylinder oil, and $7 and now she refuses to bed down with Lov, preferring a pallet on the floor. At the beginning of the story, a bag of turnips becomes the pot of gold at the end of Jeeter’s rainbow, and when Jeeter manages to steal it from Lov, he begs forgiveness from the Lord, asking Sister Bessie to intervene with prayers on his behalf. Sister Bessie, a widowed lady preacher, receives convincing messages from God that she should take sixteen-year-old Dude for a husband and make a preacher out of him. Her exploits, as well as those of the Lester family, make for interesting reading.

I’ve never read anything like ‘Tobacco Road’ and although it’s interesting reading, it also evokes a sense of unease, disquiet, and rumblings of anger. The Lesters do not seem much better than animals, living pretty much instinctually, trying to satisfy hunger and sexual appetites. Their house is in disrepair and nothing is ever fixed. When the roof leaks, they just move to another corner of the room. Jeeter dreams about growing cotton, but no creditor will lend him money. They live on land once owned by Grandfather Lester, long since lost to creditors and taxmen. There are crazy, almost comedic fiascos that occur, but the world these people live in causes my humor to dry up. Jeeter demeans Ellie May because she has a harelip that he never could find the money to get fixed. What man would want to look at that face, he asks. He sells Pearl and leers at his daughter-in-law. A lot of times, these characters just seem dumb.

Lewis Nordan says in the foreword, “When we accused others of living on Tobacco Road, we were distancing ourselves from a sociological stratum of society that we were afraid of being associated with, for that is how we--or I, anyway--understood Tobacco Road, as a sociological statement about a region.” Yes, that is completely the feeling I get from reading Tobacco Road, that the author is making a sociological statement about the poor whites that lived in this region. As I was growing up, there were some very poor children that rode my school bus and always smelled like ‘pee.’ When I told my mother about this, she said, ‘always be nice to them. That’s the way I used to smell sometimes. When you sleep several children in a bed, somebody’s likely to pee on you during the night.’ Growing up poor, my parents were motivated and compassionate. And yet, from an early age, I think I would have known to steer clear of anyone like Jeeter Lester.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book Circle Reads 148

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: University of Georgia Press's sales copy--Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.

My Review: Ye gods and little fishes! Talk about "been down so long it looks like up to me!"

A shockingly honest book when it was published in 1932, it's still a picture that comparatively rich urban Americans need to see. The details have changed only a little in 80 years. This kind of poverty not only still exists, but these horrific racial prejudices do too. Read Knockemstiff and The Galaxie and Other Rides and American Salvage for the modern-day honest storytellers mining the same vein of American life. Winter's Bone is its direct descendant! So many of the works I've labeled hillbilly noir...and this is the granddaddy of 'em all. I loved the fact that it was so grim when I first read it as an angry, angsty teen, and it still, or again, aroused my loathing and ire when re-read last year at 52.

I can't remember not thinking that people were vile, irredeemable scum, and reading books like this taught me I wasn't the first to have this insight. Even the best are brought low by the vicious kicks of a merciless gawd. They keep going to church, though, to get kicked again...ultimately the solace of "at least we're not black" (though they use the other word I can't stand even to type) isn't enough to overcome the characters' various phobias and anxieties.

This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!

A megaton of misery detonating in your brain, leaving craters a mile wide for compassion to leak out of.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read but not an easy read. I have no idea how to do a review of this book. First thing is to categorize it in my mind.

Tragedy? Too many comic moments in this book for that.
Comedy? Likewise, too much tragedy to give it that.
Love story? Not unless you count Lov's love of Pearl's yellow
hair curling down her back.
Documentary? Hmmmmm.......
Okay, that's not going to work.

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?

Maybe that is the brilliance (and it is brilliant) of this short tale of a few days with the Lesters. You don't really know what to think, but you continue to try long after having finished.

[Emiliya Bozhilova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Тютюневият път е пътят на мизерията, безнадеждността, бездействието и оскотяването. Гротеска с елементи и на трагедия, и на комедия, наричана ту “живот”, ту “съдба”, но най-често оставяна безименна.



Бедността на Колдуеловите герои е с библейски размах, а страданията им могат да засрамят Йов. Но те са свикнали… Толкова са свикнали, че много рядко нещо у тях трепва, и са предимно ходещи и дишащи мъртви, отколкото истински живи. Променящият се свят ги е изхвърлил от всички коловози, а не са им останали никакви сили и дори желание да опитат да сменят посоката. И неумолимо се оказват жертви на собствената си затъпяла инерция, която ги доразрушава къс по къс.



Светът е несправедливо, жестоко място и има нужда от раздрусване на пластовете от време на време. Но същото се отнася и за обитателите му. Душата умира дълго преди тялото и остава единствено илюзорната утеха на някое суеверие, подобно на сдъвканата щипка тютюн, която да прилъже жестоко гризящия глад поне за секунда.



Колдуел жали героите си, но е безмилостен към удобните им самозаблуди, доброволното невежество и греховете им. Защото - въпреки неточния цитат - съдбата на давещите се, в крайна сметка, поне в даден момент е била в ръцете на самите давещи се. И те също са направили погрешния избор да се откажат от битката за промяна и да останат хора…

Колдуел е минималист майсторски клас. Напълно логично забраняван в американския Юг, записал навремето в Конституцията си неотменимото гражданско право на… робство.

4,5⭐️

[Ana Cristina Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Es un viaje a la miseria, la pobreza que amenaza a la familia de Lester Jeter y a la que temen porque les hará inferiores a las familias de negros que les rodean, que habían estado tradicionalmente subordinados a ellos. Heredero de una plantación de algodón que en tiempos fue próspera, ahora Lester y su mujer Ada son meros arrendatarios, aunque se agarran a la esperanza de pedir un crédito para volver a plantar una cosecha. Han tenido 17 hijos, de los cuales sólo quedan en casa Ellie May con su labio leporino y su cuerpo explosivo y Dude, que no tiene una inteligencia normal.

El autor se centra en reflejar la ignorancia y el embrutecimiento, causa y consecuencia a la vez de la miseria, ya que todas las decisiones de todos los personajes, empezando por el pater familias Lester Jeter, son absurdas y erróneas. Son incapaces de analizar la realidad con sentido común y eso hace que nos distanciemos de ellos y los observemos como a los personajes de un guiñol.

He leído en algunos comentarios que detrás de este desapego hay una creencia por parte del autor en las teorías eugenésicas, tan populares en la época, que abogaban por la eliminación de los seres diferentes o con problemas genéticos. No creo que llegue tan lejos, pero desde luego el panorama que describe impide la esperanza y el único horizonte posible es la aniquilación.

El mérito de este libro es que logra ser divertido, no me preguntéis cómo, es mejor leerlo y conocer a los personajes y sus circunstancias, con su extraña verosimilitud. Un libro diferente, con ecos de Faulkner, un clásico que hay que conocer.

[Scot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once considered a classic of American literature, but rarely read today, I suspect, unless it is assigned, Tobacco Road is the remarkable story of the antics and tribulations of a destitute white trash family, the Lesters, written by Erskine Caldwell, and was later adapted into a play that was popular in the 1930s, and then adapted again to film by Nunnally Johnson in 1941. First published in 1932, it was followed the next year by Caldwell's other great work on poor whites in the South, God's Little Acre, which also went from play form to eventually become a film in 1958, including in its cast Buddy Hackett, Tina Louise, and a young Michael Landon.

Warning: this is a book most people will dislike, yet some people might find hilarious, because of the way it portrays poor southern whites in Georgia during the Great Depression. Do not read this if you are looking for something frivolous, or characters you can readily identify with. The characters are coarse and earthy, the bawdiness is truly remarkable for a work of serious literature in that period, and the reader should prepare to be shocked, or at least respond somewhere on the range from mildly to severely disgusted from time to time.

Why, then, would I give it five stars? Because, as Faulkner pointed out, Caldwell certainly has a knack for writing. I was drawn into the story and was compelled to learn what happened next. I also am fascinated by the fact that many people found this work so funny and entertaining then--it is a damning portrayal not only of the characters in the text, but on some levels, of the class sensibilities and lack of compassion in the entertained readers as well. (I don't mean to sound pompous or self-righteous here in judging them--truth be told, part of my revulsion was expressed with mixtures of chuckles and gasps as I read on, mesmerized by Caldwell's story-conveying ability.) The characters are caricatures, pathetic human beings, shiftless, lazy, and incredibly selfish. Yet there is a sense of overarching tragedy here as well, connected to the loss of arable land. And as a historical artifact, we can look here for significant antecedents of some powerful stereotypes about white trash that circulate in our society today, stereotypes widely propagated by the Jerry Springer Show and that live on through several reality shows currently airing on Viacom channels.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

My parents grew up in Sabine Parish, Louisiana, and took me to the farms and back roads of the Parish, which were in many ways like those depicted in "Tobacco Road" in Georgia. My mother and her family had a hard life. My father's family got by on subsistence farming, owning their own land but farming was very difficult during that time. They would tell me stories of poverty and leaving the land and working in the sawmill or the oilfield and the stress on the families and their struggle to exist and their striving for a better life. Erskine Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" shows that hard life better than any book I've read so far.

The reason I was drawn to it was because "Tobacco Road" was reviled by the church and the press because it was so graphic regarding sex. It also depicts the stark reality of life led by poor whites in the south, which is shocking even today, and hard for a people trying to forget their difficult past. So, I had never read it up until now, letting it pass me by, but it is merely written in the naturalistic style, which is taken for granted now.

At some point I would like to read Erskine's short stories and "God's Little Acre".

[Duane Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quote from Slate critic Dwight Garner: "Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is a greasy hairball of a novel; one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the South". I can't disagree because it contains derogatory slurs against African Americans, women, the elderly, people with disabilities. There are references to incest, prostitution, child marriage. Well, you get the idea. Yet you can find this novel on several lists of best novels of the 20th century.

The people from that part of Georgia, around Augusta, despise Caldwell for his portrayal of the locals. But Caldwell wasn't trying to be sensationalist or funny. He believed he was calling attention to the plight of these dirt poor tenant farmers during the Great Depression. What it does call attention to is ignorance, the effect of zero education, of inbreeding, of exploitation of the poor by...well, by everyone.

It's hard to read, hard to listen to the words of ignorance and prejudice, but I believe these people existed, and I think some of their descendants are still trying to pull themselves out of that dark abyss.

[Jessaka · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I was a teenager 1 of the librarians introduced me to the book,The Shepherd of the Hills. I loved it and asked her if she could find more books about mountain people. That she did. Then 1 day she ran out of ideas, so I found this book on my own. I sat down in our living room and begin reading the book. My mother saw the title of it and took it away from me. She wanted to read it 1st. I think That it was the title that caught her eye. She came back to me later and said, this book is dirty. You cannot read it. When I was in college I thought about this book and got it out of the library. I do not remember what I thought of it back then. I know what I think now.

I could not finish this book this time around because I found it not dirty but despicable. If the author is trying to show us the hardships of living in the mountains when people lost their jobs, well, he did a good job, but he does it by making fun of the people Stereo typing them. This is the second book that I have read by him that makes fun of the people that live in the mountains. His books are nothing like the books I read and continue to read about people living in the mountains. Not that there are not people like this in the world and even worse, but if you want people to be concerned for others, you do not make fun of them. You do as John Steinbeck had . You write about the hardships of good people.

Butt, then again, maybe my mother was also right.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

So Goodreads wants to know, "What do you think?"

1) I think this book made me revisit my family and upbringing more than I wanted to think about it.

2) I think the characters are rather one-dimensional, and for once, that's a good thing as they were made up of bits and pieces of their environment which was one-dimensional at best.

3) I think this book is sad. Sad to the point where you start to not care what happens to these people. They don't know anything better than to keep trying the same things over and over even though the end result will never change.

"He had felt himself sink year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life."

I'm tired of thinking.

[John Hatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the funniest, saddest, most serious and most tragic books I've read in a very long time. In fact, I wish I had read it a very long time ago. Then I could read it again now! Brilliant.

[Werner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Georgia-born in 1903, and the son of a Presbyterian minister who seems to have functioned as a sort of literary muse for him, by ca. 1930 Erskine Caldwell was a college drop-out, veteran of a variety of short-lived jobs, now resident in Maine with his first wife (he would ultimately have four marriages, at least three of which apparently ended in divorce) and an indefatigable would-be writer. He'd already had two unsuccessful novels published; but his break came when some of his short stories attracted the favorable notice of New York publishing executive Maxwell Perkins. The latter asked him to submit a novel, and this book (published in 1932) was the result. At first, sales and reader reactions were poor; but a 1933 stage play adaptation on Broadway became a sensation, running for eight years, which rendered the book trendy and turned it and his 1933 novel God's Little Acre into best-sellers. The critical community of that day (which had not yet unanimously decided that all best-sellers must by definition be trash) obligingly canonized him as a Great Proletarian Voice, nobly crusading for justice on behalf of the Depression-era rural poor. (In much of his subsequent writing, he would play to that image; but whether or not it's a fair characterization of this novel will be discussed below.)

Unhappily for Caldwell, this represented the peak of his fortunes; the next 54 years went steadily downhill. He wrote movie scripts in Hollywood for five years, co-wrote three photodocumentary books with his second wife, noted photographer Margaret Bourke-White (she did the photographs and he wrote the text), and was also a foreign correspondent at times for various journalistic entities. reporting from the Russian front during World War II. But none of these projects ever attained the same level of success as the afore-mentioned two novels; and after his father's death in 1944, in the words of the Chicago Tribune's review of Dan B. Miller's Caldwell biography Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road, "the moral spine of the author's work melted away." Under the influence of heavy drinking, the quality of his work steadily declined into what the same reviewer characterizes as hack work, and when he died in 1987 of emphysema and lung cancer (he was also a heavy smoker), he had largely been forgotten by both the critical elite and ordinary readers.

I read this novel in ca. 1970, as part of my then active project of becoming a more "educated" reader by diligently reading books that I'd been given to understand were "classics." (In a strictly chronological sense, the publication date puts this book in the "classic" age range; but I'm not, in all honesty, willing to shelve it under a rubric that might suggest literary quality.) The plot focuses on the family of backwoods Georgia sharecropper (on exhausted land) Jeter Lester; his son-in-law Lov Bensey, who married Jeter's youngest daughter when she was 12, and Sister Bessie Rice, a 39 year-old charlatan "preacher" who shacks up with Jeter's teenage son Dude. In his Preface to the 1974 Beehive Press reprint edition, Caldwell asserts that he wrote the book as a "sympathetic" tale highlighting the sufferings inflicted on the rural poor by the share-cropping system. As evidence of said sufferings, he invokes the photos in one of his collaborations with Bourke-White, the 1937 book You Have Seen Their Faces.

It's quite probable that Bourke-White was indeed sympathetic to these people and eager to call remedial attention to their plight, and by 1937 Caldwell might even have convinced himself that he was too. But while Tobacco Road does have one or two passages that are critical of the share-cropping economy, the overwhelming bulk of the book presents nothing that can remotely be characterized as "sympathetic" to the people he portrays. They're depicted as essentially stupid and morally degenerate, incapable of helping themselves, and too repulsive to inspire helpfulness in anybody else. The plot is simply an exhibition of unbridled selfishness, callousness, sexual depravity, spousal/child/elder abuse, racism and sexism, general meanness, and perversion of religious faith. I wasn't surprised to recently learn that the Lesters were in fact based on a family that the senior Caldwell, Rev. Ira, attempted to help with jobs and a better house, but who preferred to move back to their old home. Erskine assumed (not necessarily correctly) that their attitude was a perverse determination to live in squalor for its own sake, and set out here to do a thorough hatchet job on them. He succeeded in that; the overwhelming message of this book, delivered about as subtly as a sledgehammer to the face, is that the poor are poor because they're just too morally and intellectually defective to be anything else, and that trying to help them is a fool's errand.

To see this in its literary context, this is a textbook example of the Naturalist school of literature, usually viewed as a subset of Realism (that, of course, depends on how you see reality!), which portrays human behavior as simply mindless response to animal bodily urges and instincts, with an overlay of conditioning. (Indeed, the Lesters and their connections are as animalistic a bunch as you'll encounter anywhere outside of a zoo.) It's also an example of a trend in portraying rural people, especially in the South (Appalachia was particularly liable to this treatment, but other areas were targeted as well, as here) as exaggerated grotesques, freaks who could properly be exhibited for the amusement and/or pleasurable horror of "normal" people who could afford to buy books. (A lot of modern discussion of this book also focuses on whether or not Caldwell had a conscious agenda here of promoting the eugenics movement. That's impossible to determine if we're not posthumous mind readers; but it is a fact that the book was appealed to as evidence by the framers and promoters of Georgia's 1937 law allowing the involuntary sterilization of the 'unfit.")

I'm happy for readers who are able, for whatever reasons, to see this as a noble call for social justice. To put it mildly, it didn't come across that way to me; and I don't recommend it to anybody.

[Julie]

I felt I needed to "fill in" my gaps in Southern Fiction, but I think it will go unfilled for a little while longer. Not for me.

Faulkner, 1 . Caldwell 0.

One of the few times in my time here on goodreads when I feel like writing: OMG. ... OMG, and really meaning it.

How bad could it be?

If you were ever a fan of the original X-files ... David Duchovny & Gillian Anderson, "take one" ... you will no doubt remember the Peacock family. I still have an urge to retch when I remember that episode. This book is Peacock Family in written form. (Come to think of it, the writers for the X files may have been one-time fans of Caldwell, and that's where the storyline originated.)

I think there is a way to pick up the sadness, sorrow and desperation of being a "dirt poor sharecropper" without resorting to Peacockness. Even if one feels there is much inherent depravity, and needs to speak out, ... there must be a better way than the repetitive, moronic sing-song that Caldwell adopts.

I guess I just don't need Deliverance delivered on a page, while I'm trying to read in my bedroom late at night.

I felt I should be getting up to scrub the walls and wash all the linens, ... I had a desire to take it all out in the backyard and burn the whole lot, so contaminated did I feel.

What came to mind, in fact, were some lines from T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral

It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone
from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the
muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone,
wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them
Wash them!

Be warned.

My friends know I don't post these warnings lightly.

[a_reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal. Horrific. Terrifying.

Tobacco Road has haunted me for days. The characters and their shenanigans have permeated my subconscious. I cannot help but dwell on it even when I am not actively reading.

Jeeter Lester and his family are unforgettable. They live in rural Georgia during the height of the Great Depression and practically starving to death on their sharecropper cotton farm. The men are amoral, ruthless, and liars. The women have physical deformities and are just as mean-spirited. It is an unpleasant story to be sure.

Erskine Caldwell aims to take the reader out of their comfort zone into unknown territory. He wanted to challenge us. And he succeeded. Many scenes were filled with cruel images.

This is not a simple tale. There are complex layers that kept me thinking and thinking. The social injustice issues of the 1930's, the racial hatreds, the war between rich and poor, and the role of evangelical religion among the poor.

But despite all this there are hints of humor within the bleak landscapes and several times I couldn't help but laugh. A strange paradox.

Caldwell highlighted the cruelty of humanity and many will not like it one bit. Read at your own risk.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Look at them two big holes running down into her face - how does she keep it from raining down in there, you reckon?” “I’ll be damned if I know. Maybe she puts cork stoppers in them to keep the water out.”

Welcome to Hillbilly Hell.

The Lester’s are poor, ignorant, and sexually degenerate to the nth degree. They live in abject poverty brought about by the perfect storm trifecta of wretched judgment, blind faith and unchecked procreation.

Caldwell’s characterization of America’s lowest class may have been published in 1932, but its legacy (and their progeny) still abounds. U.S. pop culture is rife with representatives: Ernest T. Bass, Jethro Bodine, Junior Samples, Larry the Cable Guy…

The paradox of Tobacco Road is that it is both darkly comedic and sadly realistic. Anyone who resides in the American Midwest or South can attest, these people are still with us. They populate trailer parks, drive broken down jalopies and congregate at Walmart, Kmart and Trump rallies. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, and MY relatives. I laugh because Caldwell’s depiction seems grossly exaggerated and then cry because I know it’s not.

[WJEP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a mean-spirited burlesque. "Some people has got a way of talking about people like us" -- Caldwell is one of them people. I'm not saying that I'm above gawking and mocking the mental and physical deformities of these poor bumpkins. It's hard for me to pick a favorite scene because they were all so outrageous. But I found it two-faced when the narrator occasionally broke character and pretended to be a journalist or social scientist.

[Φώτης Καραμπεσίνης · Rating 4 out of 5]

Βραδυφλεγές και απόλυτα ελεγχόμενο βιβλίο τα "Καπνοτόπια" προχωρά με αργούς ρυθμούς, αφαιρώντας εκ προθέσεως τα όποια λογοτεχνικά στολίδια σε βαθμό κουραστικό αλλά άκρως ρεαλιστικό, προκειμένου σταδιακά να σκιαγραφήσει μια απόλυτα πεσιμιστική ατμόσφαιρα.
Η φρίκη εδώ δεν κρύβεται στις τελούμενες πράξεις -και ας είναι σκληρές και οδυνηρές για τις αισθήσεις μας-, αλλά στην αταραξία με την οποία αντιμετωπίζουν οι ήρωες όσα ενσκήπτουν καθημερινά, σταθερά, με το ρυθμό της ανατολής και της δύσης του ηλίου ή καλύτερα με εκείνον της σοδειάς του καπνού που στον "κύκλο" του ζουν και πεθαίνουν -με κτηνώδη απουσία ενσυναίσθησης - τα αποκαΐδια της ζωής.
Δεν είναι το κόκκινο ή -βεβαίως- το μαύρο το χρώμα του θανάτου, αλλά το λευκό. Θεωρούμενο ως απουσία, ως ατέρμονη ακαμψία ανθρώπινων ζωών που "αλέθονται" στη "μυλόπετρα" της ιστορίας, αθύρματα καταστάσεων των οποίων το νόημα εσαεί τους διαφεύγει. Η αρρώστια, τα γηρατειά, ο θάνατος -βίαιος ή φυσικός- δεν αποτελεί παρά μία ακόμα στιγμή στο λευκό τοπίο του Limbo, όπου έχουν για πάντα μετοικίσει οι ήρωες του βιβλίου.
Μέχρι τέλους, τα πρόσωπα του δράματος (τόσο "αφυδατωμένα" από αισθήματα και ανθρώπινη ουσία που δύσκολα χαρακτηρίζονται "τραγικά") αγωνίζονται όχι για να ξεπεράσουν τη δεινή κατάσταση στην οποία έχουν περιέλθει, αλλά για να επαναλάβουν την ίδια ακριβώς πορεία που τους οδηγεί στον όλεθρο "δειλοί, μοιραίοι και άβουλοι αντάμα". Αλλά το θαύμα που προσμένουν δεν θα προκύψει για να τους σώσει από τον εαυτό τους και το τέλος δεν είναι παρά μια ακόμα επανάληψη της αρχής.

(Διαβάστηκε το καλοκαίρι του 2017)