A full-length portrait of the highly controversial author of 'God's Little Acre' and 'Tobacco Road.' A shy man bounds from a canvas alive with harsh mood swings and unpredictablity.
This is a full portrait of a complicated personality. Caldwell's unpredictability, harsh mood swings and extramarital affairs are paralleled with instances of warmth, gentleness and generosity. A shy man bounds from a canvas alive with controversy. This book is an attempt to better understand an American storyteller. Eighty million copies of his books have been sold. His most famous books - raising many prudish eyebrows - were God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road. Caldwell gave his fictional characters a rugged durability by keeping the diction simple. Slapstick bubbled from the pages in combinations rarely exhibited by contemporaries. Here was a writer who possessed the true burlesque touch: vulgarity mixed with rural humor and folklore, neurotic situations passed off as ordinary occurrences, and tragedy which began with laughter and ended without remorse.
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