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The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell, edited by Robert L. McDonald. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. xx, 309 pp. $69.50.
THOUGH LONG ACKNOWLEDGED A MINOR SOUTHERN AUTHOR, Erskine Caldwell, at the time of his death in 1987, had achieved the distinction of being one of the century's most popular writers. Since the year of his death (and even before), there has been a steady and concerted effort on the part of a small number of scholars and two university presses-the University of Georgia Press and Louisiana State University Press-(both having issued reprints of major titles in the Caldwell canon) to reclaim and promote Caldwell's often maligned literary reputation. In fact, in 1987, Caldwell scholar Ronald Wesley Hoag, observing that "Erskine Caldwell's contribution to American literature can no longer be ignored," perceptively predicted that "Caldwell studies are now only a shadow of what they will become."1 As an advocate of renewed scholarly interest in Caldwell, Hoag concluded his bio-bibliographical essay on Caldwell, extending the following invitation: "To evaluate [Caldwell's] contribution is a significant opportunity and challenge" (p. 96). In response to this "challenge," six new books on Caldwell have appeared in the nineties. The first of these, Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered (1990), edited by Edwin T. Arnold, consists of essays and interviews-all initially published in a special issue of the Southern Quarterly in 1989-with Caldwell's first and fourth wives. In 1991, Sylvia Jenkins Cook's Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit, a study Edwin Arnold has called the "single best literary examination of Caldwell's work,"2 examined all of his stories, novels, and nonfiction, including journals and book reviews. Two years later, Harvey L. Klevar, a sociologist, published Erskine Caldwell A Biography (1993), the first major treatment of Caldwell's life, a book which Caldwell himself had personally authorized in 1977. Then in 1995, two more books, both interestingly by historians rather than literary critics, were published-Dan B. Miller's Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road and Wayne Mixon's The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South-the former, a biography, which, among other things, probes into the tragic dimensions of Caldwell's life, and the latter, designated by the author "an intellectual biography," which explores Caldwell's views on racism, his interest in social reform, and...