Novelist Caldwell Finds No Forgiveness for Depictions of South

Erskine Caldwell, whose novels “God’s Little Acre” and “Tobacco Road” depicted Southerners crazed by hunger, sex and despair, returned to his native Georgia recently--but found no forgiveness.

“Some things will never be forgotten--or forgiven,” said Caldwell, 82, whose 80 novels often depicted Southerners seeking life’s meaning in seedy bars and other disreputable places. “I think that’s human nature and I don’t think it’s anything personal. It’s just the condition of people, unwilling to forgive and forget.”

The South is a dramatically different place from his youth, said Caldwell, who traveled as a boy with his Presbyterian preacher father. Later, he drove a country doctor on his rounds, visiting the homes of ailing blacks and whites who later became such characters as Jeeter Lester in the novel “Tobacco Road.”

“There’s been a great change in rural Georgia, the rural South, from in my early days in the 1920s,” Caldwell said. “It was a very bleak future for people who were living there because of the poverty.

“There’s been such a great change and that change was due to the advancement of education, improvements in the economy and social services. It’s a Georgia that never existed in my day, when education was a rare thing.

“Tobacco Road has long since been paved with asphalt, and it’s a good thing, too.”

Caldwell, who now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., came back to Georgia as part of a program to bring authors to smaller communities. And despite lingering objections to his depictions of the South in such towns, he believes his works have redeeming social value.

“I think ‘Tobacco Road’ must have had some valuable result,” Caldwell said, “because the memory of it still exists. It must have had an impact for good rather than for bad, and I’m glad I did what I did.

“I would not change anything, regardless of the attitude of anybody,” he said. “But I respect a reader who objects to something I write because that means somebody takes enough interest to have an attitude. Some people would read it and just throw it away.”