SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit, Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp. 39-100.

In the excerpt below, Cook surveys the themes of Gulf Coast Stories and Certain Women, detecting a narrowing of the range of issues and concerns from Caldwell's earlier collections of stories.

With Georgia Boy, most critics would probably prefer to believe Caldwell's career as a short story writer had come to an end. There was, in fact, a long hiatus in his writing of stories after 1943, although a new collection of previously published work by him was issued almost annually for the next ten years. However, it was not until 1953 that any significant number of new stories began to appear; these were issued in 1956 as Gulf Coast Stories. The title of the collection reflects one of Caldwell's Main literary interests in the interval—regionalism, illustrated...