Erskine Caldwell: Modernist Manqué

Loren Glass

doi:10.4324/9781315248714-15

The scholarly work on Erskine Caldwell is surprisingly scattershot. Author of God’s Little Acre, one of the best-selling novels of all time, husband of and collaborator with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Caldwell was an immensely popular author of the thirties and forties. When he published his first book of short stories with Scribners, he looked likely to become a canonical modernist on a par with William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway, in whose company he was frequently mentioned at the outset of his career. Instead, Caldwell chose to focus on the mass market, teaming up with New American Library to become one of the most successful authors of the paperback revolution. His academic neglect is at least partly a product of this peculiar publishing trajectory. My intention in this piece is not so much to “correct” this neglect as to understand it, particularly in relation to Caldwell’s earlier promise and popularity. I see Caldwell’s career as a symptomatic case study in the politics and practices of literary reputation and authorial celebrity during the modernist era in the United States. In Authors Inc. I analyze these politics and practices as emerging from the tension between what Pierre Bourdieu calls the fields of restricted and large-scale cultural production. The former represents the relatively autonomous world of artists and writers who produce for an audience of each other; the latter represents the heterogeneous general public in which culture is circulated for profit. Using these broad designations as a methodological rubric, I formulate that In essence, Caldwell traveled too far along this arc, moving beyond the middlebrow to the resolutely pulp, abandoning in the process any critical caché that might have allowed him to straddle fields, as Hemingway so effectively did. But, as I hope to show, Caldwell’s very failure to maintain the tension that would keep other modernists safely consecrated even as their books also appeared in mass market form reveals the class politics that subtended the divisions of the cultural field in the modern United States.

Erskine Caldwell: Modernist Manqué

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