SOURCE: An introduction to The Pocket Book of Erskine Caldwell Stories, edited by Henry Seidel Canby, Pocket Books, 1947, pp. vii-xvi.

Canby was an American educator, critic, biographer, and the co-founder and first editor of the Saturday Review. In the following essay, which was first published in 1944 as Canby's introduction to a collection of Caldwell's stories, the critic likens Caldwell to a sociologist for his detailed examinations of humanity in his short fiction.

Erskine Caldwell is one of those rare men in human experience who have done both what they wanted and what they have thought that they wanted. He thought that he wanted most of all to "go places," to see people in a living experience of the sociology he picked up at the University of Virginia. However, he began his travelling—more accurately described as vagabondage—long before he ever heard of sociology. In childhood and youth...