Enough for Any Man

SURELY most readers past their youth remember Erskine Caldwell—if not as the youthful peer of Faulkner and Wolfe, at least as the author of vaguely smutty drugstore paperbacks with lurid covers. Some may be reminded of him by current events: recently in NR Florence King noted “the descent of the Clintons back into the Erskine Caldwell novel whence they came.” But in 1987, when Caldwell died, I suspect many were surprised to hear that he had lived that long, and for younger folk the one-time “World’s Best-Selling Author!” has dropped completely off the screen. Dan Miller, for instance, begins this biography with the startling admission that “I first heard of Erskine Caldwell in 1989. . . . His name did not ring a bell.”

Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road, by Dan B. Miller (Knopf, 459 pp., $30)

JR

About the Author

John Shelton Reed

SURELY most readers past their youth remember Erskine Caldwell—if not as the youthful peer of Faulkner and Wolfe, at least as the author of vaguely smutty drugstore paperbacks with lurid covers. Some may be reminded of him by current events: recently in NR Florence King noted “the descent of the Clintons back into the Erskine Caldwell novel whence they came.” But in 1987, when Caldwell died, I suspect many were surprised to hear that he had lived that long, and for younger folk the one-time “World’s Best-Selling Author!” has dropped completely off the screen. Dan Miller, for instance, begins this biography with the startling admission that “I first heard of Erskine Caldwell in 1989. . . . His name did not ring a bell.”

Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road, by Dan B. Miller (Knopf, 459 pp., $30)