SOURCE: "Mr. Caldwell's Moods," in The New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1953, pp. 4, 46.

In the following review of The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell, Nichols includes the author's own recollections about the composition of such stories as "Country Full of Swedes" and "Kneel to the Rising Sun."

[The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell] is, of course, the definitive collection of all the short stories written by Erskine Caldwell—ninety-six of them. Here are the familiar ones and those less familiar, the short ones and the long. Here are those which have been dramatized time and again (although perhaps never so thoroughly as Mr. Caldwell's Tobacco Road ) and those which were born to blush practically unseen in now departed little magazines.

As the pages turn—and a lot of pages there indeed are—Mr. Caldwell roams through a writer's moods. He appreciates, as only an observant Southern visitor could...