‘Tobacco Road’ Author Erskine Caldwell Is Dead at 83

Erskine Caldwell, the writer who shocked readers and outraged many of his fellow southerners with unvarnished novels and short stories about squalid life in the cotton country backwoods, died Saturday in Paradise Valley, Ariz., after years of battling lung cancer. He was 83.

The author of “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre” as well as nearly 50 volumes of short stories, underwent treatment for lung cancer in September, 1986, at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital in Arizona. He had been operated on twice 11 years earlier.

His fourth wife, Virginia, with whom he had been living in Scottsdale for the latter part of his life, said he died shortly before 8 p.m.

Caldwell was one of the most successful writers in history. His books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 40 languages. “God’s Little Acre,” banned in Boston and reviled by many after it was published in 1933, was at one time the champion best-seller with more than 10 million copies. It is still 10th on the all-time fiction list.

Minister’s Son

“Tobacco Road,” his 1932 novel, was turned into a stage play and ran for nearly eight years on Broadway--a record at the time.

Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister’s son who as a boy saw poverty govern the lives of both both blacks and whites throughout rural Georgia and other parts of the south, never seemed perturbed by the criticism he received for putting the seamy images in print.

“I must have had an impact for good rather than bad,” he said in 1985, when at age 82 he returned to Georgia for a state-sponsored writers’ program. “And I’m glad I did what I did. . . . There’s been a great deal of change in rural Georgia . . . the rural South. If one of my short stories opened someone’s eyes, then I have been successful.”

In his autobiography, “With All My Might,” released in March by Peachtree Publishers, Caldwell clearly sensed that his career was over. “From the first bright rays of dawn to the shade of evening,” he wrote, “the day is done.”

He said in that book: “My goal from the beginning has been to be a writer of fiction that revealed with all my might the inner spirit of men and women as they responded to the joys of life and reacted to the sorrows of existence.”

He said he had resisted “glorifying the sensational and knowingly falsifying the anguish or the jubilation” of his characters because “the human spirit should not be ravished and outraged in print by ghouls at large.”

Credits Father

Although reviled in his early years by many critics, Caldwell once told the Saturday Review, “If you are going to take criticism very seriously, then you will stop writing anything.”

He recalled for that interviewer that it was his father, the Rev. Ira S. Caldwell, who took him from place to place in the South during his boyhood and showed him the misery of dirt-poor people.

Caldwell was born Dec. 17, 1903, in Moreland, Ga., and moved with his parents from one place to another in the Carolinas, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee and back to Georgia. During his high school years in Wrens, Ga., he got a night job shoveling cottonseed into a conveyor belt at the local mill--but his parents made him quit when he fell asleep at the breakfast table.

He then took a summer job turning the hand press at the Jefferson (County) Reporter and was soon allowed to set type by hand as well as write short items about local doings. Before long he was also folding the papers and delivering them.

When after seven weeks he asked for a salary of some sort, Caldwell wrote in his 1951 book, “Call it Experience,” the editor said, “You didn’t expect me to pay you money for learning the business, did you?”

He quit after being “given to understand that I was not proving to be a loyal worker.” But he had discovered that daily newspapers around the state used local stringers to supply news of the small communities, so he began to mail items to papers in Atlanta, Macon and Augusta.

Caldwell also knocked about picking cotton, working as a chauffeur and doing numerous other jobs in order to go to college. He spent a year at a small Presbyterian college in Due West, S.C., but stayed only a year before leaving to work at other jobs and then to enter the University of Virginia, where he worked nights in a pool hall to support himself.

Wrote for Atlanta Paper

He had begun trying to write, and in 1925--two years short of graduation--quit the university to take a job as a cub reporter on the Atlanta Journal. Before too long he was on the move again, settling in Maine with his first wife, Helen Lannigan, to write short stories.

Success came slowly--first with an occasional story published in one of the small magazines that paid little or nothing. Then he sold a novelette, “The Bastard.” Maxwell Perkins, the famed Charles Scribner’s Sons editor, spotted his stories and published a collection of them under the title “American Earth.”

With the little money he made from that, Caldwell took off by himself around the country with his portable typewriter and his cigarette-rolling machine, living in a cheap Hollywood hotel room for a while, returning to Wrens, Ga., and finally going to New York where he turned out “Tobacco Road.”

His fame and his financial security were assured. The royalties from the stage play alone were enough to keep him comfortable for many years. Then came “God’s Little Acre,” the runaway best-seller. Its profanity and sexually explicit passages brought not only a ban in Massachusetts but his home state Georgia Literary Commission recommended jail for anyone caught reading it.

A New York magistrate, however, ruled that the novel was, indeed, literature.

In 1933, Caldwell won the Yale Review fiction award.

Three years later, he published “Journeyman,” a novel about a traveling preacher who arrives at a remote Georgia community to drink, seduce the women and arouse the town to a revival meeting orgy. That also was turned into a play--though not successfully--and was also denounced by reviewers as filthy, lewd and immoral.

sh Worked for Movie Studio

Caldwell worked for a time as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but his two big assignments were to write short features in a series called “Crime Does Not Pay” and to co-author a logging camp script for Clark Gable. It was never produced.

In 1936, he did a book about the deep South with Margaret Bourke-White, the Life magazine photographer whom he was to marry in 1939 after divorcing his first wife. The success of that effort, “Have You Seen Their Faces?” prompted Caldwell and Bourke-White to do a similar book in Europe, “North of the Danube.”

During World War II, he was a correspondent for Life, the newspaper PM and for CBS in China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union.

He was divorced from Bourke-White and married June Johnson in 1942. He married Virginia Moffett Fletcher in 1957.

Caldwell had three children--Erskine Preston, Dabney Withers and Janet--by his first wife and one--Jay Erskine--by his third.

Until he finally seemed to settle in Scottsdale, he was always on the move, living in San Francisco, Tucson, Florida and elsewhere.

He finally quit smoking in 1972 at the urging of a Mayo Clinic physician, but three years later underwent surgery for lung cancer. A few months later, cancer was found in the other lung, and he was operated on again.

He considered more recent fiction nothing but “polyester,” with authors trying to outdo each other for sheer sensationalism. As for his own “God’s Little Acre,” he said: “I did not consider it obscene in that day, so I would not consider it obscene at any time. I am a very conservative writer.”

A private memorial service was scheduled for today, with cremation on Monday.