Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell in 1975
Born	Erskine Preston Caldwell December 17, 1903 Moreland, Georgia, U.S.
Died	April 11, 1987(1987-04-11) (aged 83) Paradise Valley, Arizona, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Notable works	Tobacco Road God's Little Acre

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903 – April 11, 1987) was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States in novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but also made him controversial among Southerners of the time who felt he was deprecating the people of the region. Caldwell was a supporter of eugenics at a time it was gaining in popularity in the United States, and his novels can be read as promoting new legislation requiring involuntary sterilization.

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small community White Oak in Coweta County, Georgia. He was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his schoolteacher wife Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell. Rev. Caldwell's ministry necessitated moving the family throughout the South, including the states of Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When he was 15 years old, his family settled in Wrens, Georgia. His mother Carrie was from Virginia. Her ancestry included English nobility which held large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English ancestors and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell's ancestors were Scots-Irish and had also been in the country since before the revolution and had fought in it.

Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine College, a Presbyterian affiliated school nearby in South Carolina. His political sympathies lay with the working classes and he used his experiences with farmers and common workers to write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life he presented public seminars on the typical conditions of tenant-sharecroppers in the South.