Miller offers a fresh reassessment of Caldwell's place in the national literary canon. Drawing on private letters, interviews with family members and friends, and contemporary criticism, he traces with narrative grace and style the sometimes tumultuous, yet always compelling, path of a true American original. Photos.

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.

Both biographically revealing and analyticallyastute, author Jay Caldwell offers a profound, new perspective on two of America'smost renowned midcentury artists at the peaks of their careers.

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

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