Description: "I'm just an ordinary writer," Erskine Caldwell once wrote. "I'm not trying to sell anything; I'm not trying to buy anything. I'm just trying to present my vision of life." His ostensibly unsolicitous vision of Southern grotesques, of the slack-jawed, pellagra-ridden sharecroppers, repressed farmwives, and oversexed nymphets, elicited, however, anything but an "ordinary" response. Hailed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, reviled by others as a pornographer or sensationalist, Caldwell was once called "America's most popular author." Once the furor flagged, Caldwell was relegated to the "mansions of subliterature," where his reputation resides today.
Review Quotes: "provides an extensive annotation to the over 150 letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955.... These annotations are one of the best features of the collection in that they give a depth of understanding...edited with both professional concern and honest admiration for Caldwell and his work. It is certainly a collection that ought to be in every college and university library"-Popular Culture Association; "the letters...shed light on a creative writer operating in the southern USA during the years 1929-1955"-Reference Reviews; "a valuable scholarly book...an engagingly good read...a coherent and absorbing narrative"-Mississippi Review; "includes more than one hundred and fifty previously unpublished letters, notes and postcards written between 1929 and 1955"-American Literature.