SOURCE: "Sweet Are the Uses of Degeneracy," in The Southern Review, louisiana State University, Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter, 1936, pp. 449-66.

In the excerpt below, Wade surveys Caldwell's early work in an effort to "assess the Caldwell virtues and to wonder whether they are virtues good enough and numerous enough to sustain for very long the impression that he is important. "

Mr. Erskine Caldwell was born in rural Georgia in 1903. His father is a Presbyterian minister, an intellectual, solicitous about the well-being of the poor; and his mother is a school teacher. During his youth, his parents roved over most of the Southeast, and the boy went to the public schools at whatever place his father happened at the time to be preaching. There are tales of his having early, like Shelley, become convinced of the perfidy and dishonesty of school-masters. By the time he was twenty, he had ended...