In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

DIVDIVA community lynches a wrongly accused man in Caldwell’s scathing indictment of Southern prejudice/divDIV /divDIVWhen word spreads through Julie County that Sonny Clark, a black man, has assaulted Katy Barlow, a white woman, the man’s fate is sealed. With frightening speed, authorities and an outraged mob align to apprehend Clark and condemn him without trial. By the time Barlow confesses that no crime occurred, it is too late./divDIV /divDIVTold from the multiple perspectives of victim and victimizers as well as passive onlookers, Trouble in July depicts in harrowing detail the tragic ignorance of individuals who fail to understand their roles in a hateful miscarriage of justice./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div

DIVDIVA wandering preacher who gambles and chases women exposes the hypocrisies of a small Southern town/divDIV /divDIVWhen preacher Semon Dye moves into the tiny Georgia town of Rocky Comfort, many of its citizens welcome him. After all, the only church in town is being used to store fertilizer. But sermons aren’t the first thing on the mind of the tall, magnetic, and utterly dissolute man. Other callings take priority: women, whiskey, gambling, and hiding from the law. Even as he seduces wives, cheats at cards, and provokes old feuds, Dye manages to cast a dark spell over all the people in Rocky Comfort./divDIV /divDIVJourneyman is a wicked send-up of religious fervor by an American master of dark political satire./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div

The author's anecdotes, memories, interviews, and observations offer a portrayal of the religious life of the South and how southern protestantism fared during the social upheaval of the mid-1960s

DIVDIVIn this travelogue and memoir, groundbreaking novelist Erskine Caldwell looks back at a life lived in the troubled South /divDIV /divDIVFive decades removed from his own Southern childhood, novelist Erskine Caldwell sets out on a journey to find an old friend—a friend lost to him through the culture of segregation. As Caldwell follows a trail through Georgia, South Carolina, and much of the Deep South in search of his black childhood friend Bisco, his interviews with white and black Americans expose a range of attitudes that are tragic, if not surprising./divDIV /divDIVPublished first in the mid-1960s just as the South was undergoing a radical transformation by freedom marches and sit-ins, In Search of Bisco offers a heartfelt account of the civil rights movement by one of the region’s fiercest critics and most prominent sons./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div

DIVDIVFourteen stories that follow a young boy coming of age in a dysfunctional family in the rural South /div DIVMeet William Stroop, a young son of the South whose charming voice and mordant observations of family and culture make him one of American literature’s most memorable narrators. In these fourteen interwoven stories, William details the high (and low) points of his family history, focusing particularly on his lazy, scheming father, Morris, his put-upon mother, Martha, and his confidante, Handsome Brown, a young black farmhand. As Morris matches wits with strangers and neighbors alike in constant pursuit of get-rich-quick plans, Martha tries to hold the family together without the aid of any discernable income./divDIV /divDIVTold with the polish and moral resonance of fables, Georgia Boy captures the beauty and tragedy of life in the rural South during the twentieth century./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library./div/div