I’ve never read anything like ‘Tobacco Road’ and although it’s interesting reading, it also evokes a sense of unease, disquiet, and rumblings of anger. The Lesters do not seem much better than animals, living pretty much instinctually, trying to satisfy hunger and sexual appetites. Their house is in disrepair and nothing is ever fixed. When the roof leaks, they just move to another corner of the room. Jeeter dreams about growing cotton, but no creditor will lend him money. They live on land once owned by Grandfather Lester, long since lost to creditors and taxmen. There are crazy, almost comedic fiascos that occur, but the world these people live in causes my humor to dry up. Jeeter demeans Ellie May because she has a harelip that he never could find the money to get fixed. What man would want to look at that face, he asks. He sells Pearl and leers at his daughter-in-law. A lot of times, these characters just seem dumb. Bode, Carl (March 1956). "Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative". College English. 17 (6): 357–359. doi: 10.2307/372378. JSTOR 372378. a b Trueheart, Charles (March 1, 1987). "Erskine Caldwell The Final Chapter". Washington Post . Retrieved October 1, 2022.

Caldwell, Virginia Moffett Fletcher". Social Networks and Archival Context . Retrieved October 2, 2022. Escrita en 1932, en plena Gran Depresión, esta breve y ácida novela refleja el triste destino de los pequeños agricultores arruinados por los cambios económicos que estaban teniendo lugar. Daddy said he never had a 'real' toothbrush until he joined the service when he was 17. (He made them from a twig of a specific tree branch by flaring and separating one end to act as bristles. He showed us how he did it on one visit to see Grandma.)With cumulative sales of 10 million [9] and 14 million copies, [10] respectively, Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre rank as two of the best-selling American novels, all-time, with the former being adapted into a 1933 play that set a Broadway record for consecutive performances, since surpassed. Caldwell, Virginia Moffett, b. 1919". Dartmouth Library Archives & Manuscripts. dartmouth.edu . Retrieved October 2, 2022. He dropped out of Erskine College to sign aboard a boat supplying guns to Central America. [3] Caldwell entered the University of Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but was enrolled for only a year. [3] He then became a football player, bodyguard, and salesman of "bad" real estate. [3] With that said we know that reading is an education. Reading allows a person to learn about anything and everything. This knowledge can be obtained at your local library where readers can find information at their fingertips which, as readers, we already know. The tobacco road that passes by the rural Georgia home of Jeeter Lester and his family, in Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road, may speak to the prosperous colonial history of tobacco farming. But by the early-20th-century setting of this novel, the tobacco market has long since gone bust, and the cotton market seems likely to follow. And impoverished small farmers like Jeeter Lester, sharecroppers who are trying to make a living through tenant farming, are trapped in a system where they are bound to lose – even if they don’t know that they’re trapped.

Erskine Caldwell Biography". Id.mind.net. April 11, 1987. Archived from the original on August 18, 2009 . Retrieved August 31, 2009. Biography". John Wade. Archived from the original on September 29, 2011 . Retrieved September 29, 2011. Cook, Sylvia J. (1983). "Review: Stories of Life/North & South: Selections from the Best Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell". The Southern Literary Journal. 16 (1): 126–130. ISSN 0038-4291. JSTOR 20077726. Alongside Jeeter’s preoccupation with farming the land is his preoccupation with his own imminent death. Ada as well is fixated on her death, but their morbidity does not take the form of lamentation or self-pity. Ada's main concern is that she not be buried in her tattered, old, out-of-style calico dress, and Jeeter's main concern is that his body not be left in the old corn storage shed where it might be eaten by rats. He has had a terrible phobia of rats ever since he saw his dead father’s face half-eaten by a rat the day of his funeral. Neither of these two characters have any doubts that they are going to die sometime soon, and it is not their present life but their lifeless bodies which they care about most. Possibly they realize that their way of life is already dead; thus their primary concern becomes not the preservation of that life but its appearance during burial. The one thing Jeeter and his wife, Ada, accept is death. They tell anyone who will listen what they want to wear new and stylish clothes when they’re “laid out.” Although it doesn't mention it, at the time when someone died they were placed in open wooden coffins in the main room of the house and relatives and friends came to pay their respects. In death Jeeter and Ada thought and wanted to look nice when they passed and were laid out.Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of the family, would not and could not fathom working in the city in one of the cotton mills. The cotton mill was where their neighbors migrated to make a living. But the Lesters wouldn't leave the only thing they had ever known which was farming the land. After he returned from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in Connecticut, then in Arizona with third wife, June Johnson (J.C. Martin). In 1957, Caldwell married Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, who had drawn illustrations for a recent book of his, [14] moving to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, [17] later moving to Paradise Valley, Arizona, in 1977. [14] Of his residence in the San Francisco Bay Area, he once said: "I live outside San Francisco. That's not exactly the United States." [18] During the last twenty years of his life, his routine was to travel the world for six months of each year, taking with him notebooks in which to jot down his ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published but can be examined in a museum dedicated to him in the town square of Moreland, Georgia, where the home in which he was born was relocated and dedicated to his memory.

Lov departs and Caldwell reflects on Jeeter's position as a tenant farmer in the South. Even though Jeeter, like so many others around him, had the urge to plant a crop during this time of the year, there was nothing he could do. His landlord was an absentee who abandoned Jeeter and the rest of those who had lived on his land and given him shares of their crop in exchange for credit for seeds and fertilizer. The stores in the city would not grant any more credit to Jeeter or any of the other farmers because it was too risky and there were too many asking for it. The audiobook narration by John MacDonald is good. The intonation matches the language of these uneducated, poor, depraved souls. Of course the dialog is filled with grammatical errors.Tobacco Road is a novel by acclaimed writer Erskine Caldwell. Tobacco Road is the story of one family's inability to move on when life does not go as planned. Jeeter Lester has always worked the land on which his grandfather once farmed tobacco; however, debts have turned Jeeter into a sharecropper on land that the owner no longer wants to farm. Jeeter vows every year that he will find a way to buy the seed and fertilizer needed to farm the land, but every year he finds excuses not to do the work until too much time passes and planting would be futile. Tobacco Road is a story of futility, of giving up, a story that will either inspire the reader to work that much harder or continue to give up in the face of adversity. The Lesters are struggling to get by on their plantation. The Great Depression has turned the American economy upside down, and it's corrupting the Lesters' lives. Unfortunately, they have turned to morally corrupt antics, highlighting the historic racism of Southerners during this time period, among other difficulties. Jeeter sets a fire to burn off broom sedge and hopes somehow to find enough credit to farm his land that spring. As Jeeter and Ada sleep, sparks from the fire ignite the shingles of their house, which burns to the ground, killing them in their sleep. As the novel closes, Dude makes his first mention of working: He voices the same thoughts of plowing the Lester land that Jeeter had expressed throughout the story, indicating that the vicious cycle in which poor Southern farmers such as the Lesters are trapped continues. The precise setting of the novel is unclear. The Jeeters' home is said at one point to be located on "the most desirable soil in the entire west-central part of Georgia", but other passages describe it as being close to the Savannah River and Augusta, which are in eastern Georgia. These references would appear to place their home in Richmond County, of which Augusta is the county seat. The county in which the Jeeters live is also said to be adjacent to Burke County, which Richmond County is. However, the county seat of the Jeeters' county is not Augusta but the fictional town of Fuller. The Jeeters are also said to live near the fictional town of McCoy. Erskine Caldwell's political sympathies were with the working class, 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. [11]