SOURCE: "Canonize Caldwell's Georgia Boy: A Case for Resurrection," in Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered, edited by Edwin T. Arnold, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 72-85.

In the essay below, Hoag examines the ways in which the pieces in Georgia Boy comprise a unified story-cycle.

Morris Stroup is no saint, but he deserves to be saved. Also worthy of salvation are his wife, Martha; his son, William; his yardboy, Handsome Brown; his jailbird brother, Ned; and an assortment of preachers, grass widows, gypsy queens, town marshals, necktie salesladies, ridgepole goats, shirt-tail woodpeckers, enticed calves and entrapped dogs, a triumphant fighting cock and a heartbreaking chicken pot pie. If it were up to me, I would elect them all, the whole damned circus and menagerie. Lamentable indeed is the moribund state of so much life, the more so in an age of canon revision. Unsustained by the adrenaline of his early...