SOURCE: “Laughing Over Lost Causes: Erskine Caldwell's Quarrel with Southern Humor,” in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1, winter, 1996, pp. 51-68.

In the following essay, Silver contends that Caldwell's departure in Tobacco Road from traditional nineteenth-century Southern humor opened the way for the social criticism of later Southern writers.

Since its publication in 1932, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road has been both lionized and disparaged, described by some critics as the seminal work of an author in the “front rank of American writers”¹ and by others ridiculed as “drug-store stand trash.”² While in the first decade of its existence Tobacco Road was adopted (however uncomfortably) by leftists eager to awaken the South to their cause and canonized in universities throughout the nation, the last five decades have reversed such critical headway, and the academy has largely come to regard the novel as a perverse derivative of the frontier humor dating back a...