That, combined with my aunt’s dim recognition of Caldwell as an writer that perhaps she should read, made her buy both books. Such were the reputations for raciness of Erskine Caldwell’s two most famous works, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acrethat both got the pulp treatment.

Paperback publishers of the time had discovered that they could take serious works of literature (the attraction was that they could sometimes get an older work like Tobacco Roadcheaply), slap a steamy cover on it, and sell many, many units. She was indiscriminate in her reading (well, she dug steamy, I think) and bought books, I suspect, based on the provocative nature of a cover on a drugstore carousel. Tobacco Road as pulp fiction (image courtesy Goodreads)īack in the early sixties, one of my aunts was a fan of pulp fiction, those racy paperbacks that were sometimes trash, sometimes treasure. It also allowed me access to secret, forbidden worlds. Growing up as I did in the South, where for too many folks “reading” consisted of a) checking on how the Tarheels or Gamecocks or Cavaliers did, or b) reading (and usually badly misinterpreting) the Bible, my interests in books and learning made me both an anomaly and an object of suspicion, especially among my peers. It seems to me Dickens’ caricatures (whether an Ebeneezer Scrooge or a Samuel Pickwick) vibrate with more of this thing we call life than most “realistic” literary characters (I’m looking at you, Emma Bovary). While I saw the guy’s point, it didn’t make me love Dickens any less. Sometime back in my graduate school days I ran into an article in which the scholar spent a number of pages complaining that Charles Dickens didn’t create characters – rather, he created caricatures, exaggerated depictions of humanity. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell (image courtesy Goodreads)