SOURCE: "Down Tobacco Road Into Town," in The New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1957, p. 5.

In this review, Dempsey contends that Certain Women demonstrates a decline in Caldwell's talent.

In twenty-eight years of writing, Erskine Caldwell has published the impressive total of thirty-two books (four of these in collaboration with Margaret Bourke-White). His best short stories have been collected in two additional volumes and his novels have been taken apart, divested of their more serious sections, and re-assembled as an omnibus volume of humor. But sheer productivity has seldom been kind to the reputations of American novelists, and Caldwell, more than most, is a victim of his own success. His latest, and thirty-third book, Certain Women, is an example not only of an obvious decline in talent but of a related inability to find a social focus for his work.

Partly, this is a result of circumstance. The...