Alva Review-Courier -

Being a historian and teacher requires me to do lots of reading. When I have some free time away from work one of my favorite pastimes is: reading!

Reading for pleasure for me often entails delving into books on history and culture, but I also really like fiction.

One of my favorite authors is Erskine Caldwell. Born in Georgia on Dec. 17, 1903, Caldwell often portrays his fellow residents of the South although he also wrote stories about other places.

Some of his fiction is set in Maine where he lived for many years. During World War II, while serving as a war correspondent in the Soviet Union, he wrote a novel about guerilla warfare in Russia.

Caldwell was extremely productive! Eventually, he published 25 novels and approximately 150 short stories. Almost all critics agree that some of his fiction is great, some is good and some is forgettable.

Additionally, besides fiction, Caldwell wrote numerous travel books and volumes of essays. This prolific output made him lots of money, but his reputation as a significant literary figure suffered as a result of publishing too much.

All serious Southern fiction writers must have their works compared to the greatest of them all, William Faulkner.

Faulkner once listed the five best contemporary American authors (not just Southerners) as being himself, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Caldwell. This was, of course, high praise indeed.

But later Faulkner said he had quit reading Caldwell’s works because they no longer had significant literary merit. Instead, Faulkner said, Caldwell’s fiction “gradually grew toward trash.”

Like most authors, Caldwell struggled in the beginning. In 1929 and 1930, he privately published two novels that have little literary value. Meanwhile, he wrote numerous short stories and collected stacks of rejection slips.

But all of that soon changed. In 1932 and 1933 he published his third and fourth novels to great critical acclaim – and he was still not yet 30 years old! We will look further at Caldwell’s fiction next week in part 2 of this story.