God's Little Acre - Softcover

Caldwell, Erskine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451121554 ISBN 13: 9780451121554

Publisher: Signet, 1946

Synopsis

Published a year after "Tobacco Road" in 1933, "God's Little Acre" received enormous public attention because of its lurid, licentious content. Caldwell wrote forcefully, and sometimes comically, about issues many others writers were afraid to confront: the payments extracted for giving in to one's sexual cravings, injustices everywhere in American life in the Depression years, the power of the wealthy, the necessity of labor union as the working man's only hope for self-determination. This misadventured classic revolves around Georgian patriarch, Ty Ty Walden, who is forever grasping - alternately for the gold he thinks is to be found under his fields and for a divinity within himself. Living with Ty Ty on the farm that has ceased to be farmed, are his sexually depraved daughter, Darling Jill, his obedient sons, Buck and Shaw, and Buck's wife Griselda, a beautiful, innocent temptress who inadvertently sends all men (including Ty Ty) into tailspins of sexual desire. From dawn until dark, they dig up the fields, looking for gold nuggets. Ty Ty sends for his daughter, Rosamond, who lives in South Carolina with her laid-off millworker husband, the lascivious Will Thompson, to help dig. Their arrival only causes tension. Betrayals and jealousies give fuel to the underlying tension of the family until the book's solemn conclusion.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

First published in 1933, God's Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, attacked by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print. Like Erskine Caldwell's groundbreaking Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens' obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty's son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.

About the Author:

Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987) was an American novelist and short story writer who focused on life among sharecroppers and blacks in his native Georgia. Tobacco Road is his best-known novel, along with the worldwide bestseller, God’s Little Acre.

About this edition

• Publisher: Signet
• Publication date: 1946
• ISBN 10: 0451121554
• ISBN 13: 9780451121554
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback