Tobacco Road (Mass Market Paperback)

by Erskine Caldwell (Author) "LOV BENSEY trudged homeward through the deep white sand of the gully-washed tobacco road with a sack of winter turnips on his back..." (more)
Key Phrases: hard white sand, old cotton field, woman preacher, Ellie May, Sister Bessie, Lizzie Belle (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Novel by Erskine Caldwell, published in 1932. A tale of violence and sex among rural poor in the American South, the novel was highly controversial in its time. It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence and destructive sexuality. Its tragic ending is almost foreordained by the characters' inability to change their lives. Caldwell's skillful use of dialect and his plain style made the book one of the best examples of literary naturalism in contemporary American fiction. The novel was adapted as a successful play in 1933. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, this is the story of the Lesters, a family of destitute white sharecroppers. Debased by their poverty, they fear they will descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Signet (February 1, 1947)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451006275
• ISBN-13: 978-0451006271
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Archetypal Folk Carnival , July 2, 2002

By	J. E. Barnes (Bayridge, Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Tobacco Road (Paperback)

Erskine Caldwell's folk carnival Tobacco Road (1932) documents the last days in the lives of Jeeter and Ada Lester, poverty-stricken and permanently befuddled sharecroppers living in rural Georgia during the Great Depression. The tragic elements, initially almost undiscernable, strike sharply and rapidly in quick lunges before vanishing again beneath the book's brilliant comic surface.

The novel has an archetypal framework: Patriarch Jeeter, dispossessed of his ancestral land, upon which nothing will now grow but "broom sedge and scrub oak," perpetually dreams of bringing his dead and depleted soil to life. While musing on his farm's infertility, and when not lusting after the women around him, Jeeter, a father of twelve, is preoccupied with ending his own ability to reproduce via self-castration. Like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, habitually procrastinating Jeeter is continually hamstrung and locked in the stupefying moment.

Caldwell is particularly cruel in drawing his female characters: simple-minded and otherwise beautiful daughter Ellie May has a disfiguring harelip; man-crazy, self-appointed preacher Bessie has a good figure and a set of nostrils but no nose, the unnamed, unspeaking grandmother is starved by the other family members, who will no longer acknowledge her; struggling wife Ada, who has not always been faithful, dreams only of having a dress of correct length and current style to be buried in; and twelve year-old child bride Pearl has lost the will to speak and sleeps on the floor to avoid her adult husband's sexual advances. In contrast, Jeeter and handsome teenage son Dude are merely imbecilic, gullible, and grossly self-serving.

All of the characters are God fearing and largely well-intentioned towards one another, though uneducated and of extremely limited consciousness: they are guiltless of malice, if not of responsibility.

In a potentially offensive scene, newlyweds Dude and Bessie accidentally kill a black man, but think nothing of it. But this blank, spontaneous indifference to reality and the reality of other people is what makes the Tobacco Road hilariously funny. The ancient grandmother meets a painful and grueling death through another careless accident with the car; Jeeter discusses Ellie May's disfigurement without the slightest regard for her feelings; Bessie, perpetually in heat, nearly rapes unwilling, unresponsive, 16 year-old Dude; car salesmen gather to enthusiastically stare down Bessie's nostril holes and insult her; Jeeter attacks his son-in-law and steals the bag of turnips he walked has seven miles to obtain; Ellie May casually masturbates in the front yard; the whole family gathers, tribe-like, to watch Dude and Bessie make awkward love on their wedding night; the Lesters destroy a new automobile (symbol of the modern, productive, urbanized world they will never be a part of) within a few days due to recklessness and the family tradition of being unable to respect and maintain any material possession.

Like many of the characters in Muriel Spark's novels, the cast of Tobacco Road are only vaguely aware, if aware at all, of themselves as moral, spiritual, or ethical beings, despite the occasional religious trappings around them. This lack of moral awareness, "and the comedy that arises from it" is what fuels Tobacco Road. Caldwell has written the lightest of black comedies, and it is to his credit that he is capable of allowing his audience to embrace and enjoy these occasionally vigorous lost souls, even though only tragedy seems to lay ahead for all.

The universal literary and commercial success of Tobacco Road in 1932 (the novel was adapted into a long-running Broadway play, and a bowdlerized John Ford film in 1941) gave new life to the country bumpkin genre in the 20th-century. Its success helped usher in the Ma And Pa Kettle films, the Li'l Abner comic strip, some of Tennessee William's short stories, and classic American television series such as the Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), the Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971), Petticoat Junction (1963-1970), and Green Acres (1965-1971).

Despite the many ways in which sexual intentions go awry throughout the novel, Tobacco Road has a natural, healthy approach to sexuality, as does God's Little Acre, the equally-successful book which followed it. In our age of political correctness and sexual suspiciousness, the book's vibrant acceptance of sexuality as one of life's givens is admirable.

Some Southerners, at the time of its publication and continuing to the present, have objected to the book as an indictment of Southern culture. But Tobacco Road is clearly a soulful high satire, and its characters are intentionally caricatures of the basest order. Ultimately, Tobacco Road is a novel which seductively illuminates and instructs while it seamlessly entertains.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What Is This, Exactly?, August 13, 2003

By	brewster22 "brewster22" (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tobacco Road (Paperback)

If you were to ask me if I liked "Tobacco Road," my answer would be "I guess so.....I think."

It's hard to decide whether or not I liked this book because it's hard to decide what exactly this book is. It's a wisp of a thing really, about 150 pages of nothing happening. Yet it's not boring. There are parts of it that I found funny, but they are so grotesque that I'm not sure they're supposed to be funny. I wanted to sympathize with these poor, pathetic people living like animals, yet I didn't, because they so frustratingly refuse to do anything to help themselves.

Erskine Caldwell's story involves a couple of days in the life of a dismally poor one-time sharecropper and those members of his family who haven't yet left home, scraping a living out of the dust in Depression-era Georgia. Like I said, not a lot happens in the way of plot until the hurried ending, which feels tacked on by Caldwell at the last minute as if to justify to his readers why they spent their time reading his book.

If you thought the Joads of "The Grapes of Wrath" had it bad, wait until you get a load of the Lesters. This family has none of the dignity displayed by Steinbeck's characters, and it's this difference that ultimately makes the Lesters not worth caring about. Jeeter, the family's patriarch, stubborly refuses to leave his land, even though other poor families are finding opportunities and means for providing for their own families in the nearby mill towns. Jeeter justifies his refusal to leave by taking on a martyred air and feigning a noble attachment to the land, but in reality he's victim to an intensely lazy malaise that will prevent him from ever doing anything to help himself. He thinks the children who have left home never to return or even communicate with their parents have acted selfishly and callously (mostly because they refuse to send money home), but who can blame them? I wouldn't ever return home either.

I think this book is supposed to be funny; the back cover of the book compares Caldwell to Mark Twain. However, if that's the case, then this book borders on the appalling. Caldwell's tone throughout is snide and nasty--he invites us to laugh at the Lesters and their stupidity. And if we're supposed to be laughing, then one wonders what Caldwell's purpose was in writing this. If we're meant to simply read this book as a comedy, then I'm repelled at the pointlessness of the whole enterprise. I don't truly believe this was Caldwell's sole purpose, yet the book also fails as an indictment of the social institutions responsible for reducing families to this state of destitution.

"Tobacco Road" falls into that category of books that you might as well read, since it's held in high esteem by the literary establishment and will take virtually no time to finish. I think you'll be moderately entertained, but I also wouldn't be surprised if you have the the urge to scratch your head when it's all over and wonder what in the world you just sat through.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tobacco Road to Nowhere, May 3, 2005

By	Vijay B. Kumar (Wilton, Ct USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tobacco Road (Paperback)

Tobacco Road must be one of the funniest and yet heart breaking American fiction I have ever read. The patriarch, Jeeter Lester, twentieth century Don Quixote, also a predecessor to Al Bundy, selfish, lazy procrastinator, who would do anything , say anything to have his way. Every year he would plan on tilling his land to grow cotton but he is so broke that no body would lend him any money for seeds or a mule for this endeavor.

He and his wife live in a ramshackle house with two children,18 year old Ellie May who has a congenital deformity and a 16 year old imbecile, Dude, along with Jeeter's mother, who is completely ignored by the family. They had 17 children, 5 died and the rest flew the coop as soon as they could from this mad house except Ellie May and Dude. They have an equally comic neighbor, Bessie, a widow in her late 30's, who ends up marrying Dude. She lures Dude by promising him a brand new car with the money she received from her husband's insurance. She is a promiscuous nit wit and pretends to be a preacher! This "preaching", she contends is inherited from her husband. Using this logic she wants to marry Dude and make him a preacher.

Jeu d'es-prit of the book is when Jeeter, Bessie and Dude take the brand new automobile to Augusta to sell wood and end up spending the night in a sleazy motel, where Bessie is taken to different rooms by various men. Jeeter and Dude sleep in one bed, wondering why the motel owner keeps changing Bessie's room and why don't they leave her alone so she can get some rest. However, Bessie never complaints.

The book reminded me of Steinbeck's unforgettable paisanos of Tortilla Flat. It is a MUST read.