Uzbek state world languages university

ERSKINE CALDWELL (1903-1991)

E. Caldwell is a well-known American novelist and short-story writer. In his youth he went through the grim school of life; he had to change a lot of professions:

farm-hand and worker in a cotton-seed oil mill and lumber mill in Georgia; newspaper reporter, etc. The work at a newspaper was a serious school for his future literary work.
E. Caldwell was born in a family of a clergyman in 1903 in Georgia, USA. Not waiting to complete his education he embarked on the career of a newspaper writer in the “Journal Atlanta” at the age of 22. Having successfully been cotton picker, stage hand, professional football player, book reviewer, lecturer and editor, Erskine Caldwell was able to accumulate a vast amount of material through personal experience for the numerous novels and stories on American life that he wrote.

His first stories “The Bastard” and “Poor Fool” appeared in 1929. His first

collection of stories under the title “The American Land” saw its publication in 1931. In his stories he ironically exposed stubbornness, greediness. His first novel “Tobacco Road”, 1932, describes the history of degradation of a farmer’s family.

It is devoted to the hard lot of farmers in the South. These works brought him into the light and made him a prominent author.

Caldwell’s second novel “God’s Little Acre” was one of the bestsellers of the 20^th century. For some years he worked in Hollywood as a screen writer (1933-34; 1942-43) only to give repeated preference to the life of a news correspondent abroad – in Mexico, Spain and Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 and in China and

Mongolia in 1940. He was also a war correspondent in the Soviet Union in 1941 and endeavored to portray the struggle of the Soviet people against fascism in his novel “All Night Long”, 1942 (Всю ночь напролет) and in his essay “All Out on the Road to Smolensk” (Все брошено на Смоленск) and others.

E. Caldwell’s most prominent collections of stories are: “We are the Living”, 1933 (Мы – живые), “Southways, 1938 (Нравы Юга), “Georgia Boy”, 1943 (Мальчик из Джорджии), “The Gulf Coast Stories”, 1956, (Рассказы Мексиканского залива), “Around about America”, 1964, (Вдоль и поперек Америки). The humor of the story “A Small Day” is typical; of Caldwell’s manner of writing. It is not mild and light but bordering on satire. Although the situation described in the story is humorous the reader may keenly feel the miserable plight of poor people in the USA of that time.