Georgia Boy
by Erskine Caldwell
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Fourteen stories that follow a young boy coming of age in a dysfunctional family in the rural South Meet William Stroop, a young son of the South whose charming voice and mordant observations of family and culture make him one of American literature's most memorable narrators. In these fourteen interwoven stories, William details the high (and low) points of his family history, focusing particularly on his lazy, scheming father, Morris, his put-upon mother, Martha, and his confidante, show more Handsome Brown, a young black farmhand. As Morris matches wits with strangers and neighbors alike in constant pursuit of get-rich-quick plans, Martha tries to hold the family together without the aid of any discernable income. Told with the polish and moral resonance of fables, Georgia Boy captures the beauty and tragedy of life in the rural South during the twentieth century. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library. show lessTags
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After Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, this came as some surprise: this is not a novel but a collection of quaint short stories based around one family, in which the father is shifless, thieving and rather stupid as opposed to his down-to-earth wife. Here are stories of goats on roofs, schemes to earn riches by buying a paper-pulping machine, or just a few dollars by selling scrap iron. None works, of course. This is small-town America as distinct from rural America, and I don't think I can remember any violence, just simple storiies designed, perhaps, to appeal to a younger reader. Certainly these are (on the surface, at least, much simpler than the novels.
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226+ Works 4,837 Members
Erskine Caldwell has been called one of the most banned and censored authors in the United States. The son of a traveling minister, born in White Oak, Georgia in 1903, Caldwell received little formal education, as a young man, Caldwell took odd jobs and worked in the Southern states. He attended briefly Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina, show more and the Universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania for some semesters. Yet he became a prolific writer whose novels explore the seamy side of life in the American South. At the age of eighteen he went on a gun-running boat to South America, he played professional football and worked as mill-hand, cotton-picker, and in other such occupations. For a time Caldwell was a cub reporter on the Atlanta Journal. In the 1920s Caldwell moved to Maine to devote himself to writing. After several Spartan years, he had three stories accepted for publication. In 1930 Caldwell destroyed all his unpublished work from previous years. 'Country Full of Swedes' was published in the Yale Review, and it received $1,000 award from the journal in 1933. American Earth, a collection of short stories about petty passions and little lecheries, was published in 1931. Some of the stories had first appeared in such magazines as The American Caravan, Blues, Frankfurter Zeitung, Front, The Hound and Horn, Nativity, Pagany, Scribner's Magazine, This Quarter, and transition. The title of one of his novels Tobacco Road (1932) became slang for poverty and degeneracy. The book was made into both a movie (1941) and a long-running Broadway show (1933-1941). Other novels, some of which were made into later films, include The Bastard (1929), Poor Fool (1930), and God's Little Acre (1933). By the late 1940's, Caldwell had sold more books than any writer in the nation's history. Caldwell became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal in 1925, worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and was a newspaper correspondent in Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Russia and China. In 1984, Caldwell was elected, along with Norman Mailer, to the fifty-chair body of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Caldwell is the author of 25 novels, 150 short stories and 12 nonfiction books. He died in Paradise Valley, Arizona on April 11, 1987. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Ragazzo di Sycamore
- Original title
- Georgia Boy
- Original publication date
- 1943
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- 142
- Popularity
- 231,076
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.30)
- Languages
- 10 — English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 16
- ASINs
- 10
