Tobacco Road (novel)

Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell about Georgia sharecroppers. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933, and ran for eight years, an astounding feat for a non-musical, and remains the second-longest running play in Broadway history. A 1941 film version, deliberately played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford, and the storyline was considerably altered. The novel itself was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.

Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta, Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as one of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil.

Lov Bensey, a friend of the Lesters, walks to his home at the train yard coal chute. He has walked seven and a half miles to get a sack of winter turnips for fifty cents; which is half of his daily wage. On his way home he stops by the Lesters to talk to Jeeter about Jeeter's twelve-year-old daughter Pearl, to whom Lov is married. While Lov is talking to Jeeter, the book introduces the reader to sixteen-year-old Dude, the youngest of the Lester boys; Ada, Jeeter’s wife; Grandma Lester; and Ellie May, an eighteen-year-old girl with a grotesque cleft lip. The entire family, acting in complete desperation, works to steal the turnips from Lov, who then becomes nauseated by the sight and leaves for home.

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