SOURCE: "Caldwell Country Revisited: Some Rambling Comments," in Pembroke Magazine, No. 11, 1979, pp. 99-102.

Peden is an American poet, novelist, and educator. In the following essay, he extols Caldwell's short stories as "important sociological documents, bleak testimony to the devastating effects of poverty upon human behavior."

During a remarkable decade and a half from the late Twenties to the early Forties, Erskine Caldwell published approximately a hundred short stories in a variety of magazines ranging from little or avant-garde publications like Anvil, Clay, Contempo, Lion & Crown, Pagany, and Story to the Atlantic, Esquire, the New Yorker, Redbook, Scribners, and the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were popular and controversial, and some of them were highly praised; several were included in the annual Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Memorial Awards, and as knowledgeable an editor-critic as Edward J. O'Brien called Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other...