“It Ain’t Hardly Worth the Trouble to Go on Living”

Chapter 2 focuses on Erskine Caldwell and seeks to complicate understandings of his best-known works Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Though often derided for mocking the poor and using them as comic relief, Caldwell works to instil a sense of anger in readers as he reveals the economic plight of tenant farming during the Great Depression. In addition, the chapter looks at Caldwell's nonfiction work, including his phototext You Have Seen Their Faces, written with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, and contrasts its cultural context with the comparatively better known Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In addition, the chapter considers Caldwell's journalism, which originally raised national attention to the plight of the farmers he later immortalized in his fiction. Finally, the chapter closes by considering Caldwell’s later career and fall from critical favour.

Introduction

The introduction contextualizes the current state of whiteness studies and southern literary studies and argues that considering these lines of criticism alongside one another results in a more complete understanding of the underlying assumptions that have been made about poor whites and those deemed 'white trash.' In addition to analysing the history of the term, the introduction considers recent developments in southern studies scholarship, especially ways in which scholars have sought to expand recent definitions of the term “South.” The chapter also discusses the history of whiteness studies and argues that increased attention to the attitudes that middle- and upper-class whites have had toward poor whites is a fruitful line of scholarship. Finally, the introduction provides an early focus on the works of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor as representative authors who complicate ideas that whiteness is homogeneous and universal.

Back to the Land

This chapter focuses on ways that southern depression-era authors contributed or responded to a renewed interest in the “old” South during the period. While the Southern Agrarians, William Alexander Percy, and filmmakers like Victor Fleming and William Wyler created nostalgic depictions of antebellum southern life, Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell responded with “antipastoral” depictions of sharecropping that expose the exploitive social, economic, and environmental effects of plantation agriculture. The chapter also identifies ways that Zora Neale Hurston creates alternative forms of social and environmental thought through her depictions of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935).

Bataille in the South: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell’s Depression Fiction

This article tries to show how James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell in his fiction from the Depression years–especially the little-known novella, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1930)–used a discourse of the sacred to represent the strange otherness of the Depression South. They particularly drew on the “left hand sacred” (of taboo, repulsiveness and sacrifice) as distinct from the “right hand sacred” found in institutional religion. The article argues that a theoretical understanding of Agee and Caldwell’s use of the sacred may be provided by Georges Bataille. It seems particularly appropriate to invoke Bataille since he was concerned with the political elements of the sacred and sought to mobilize these elements during the 1930s when liberal democracy was thought by many leftist writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have failed. Bataille provides a productive analogue to the two southerners, who shared this perception of liberal democracy, because he tried to articulate a radical path in this decade that was not Marxist. Agee and Caldwell, although notionally Communist, were dissatisfied with Marxism because they saw it as another version of a utilitarian or restricted economy. They looked instead to the sacred as a discourse of transgression–a discourse that was rooted in what Bataille called a general economy or the deeper organization of collective life around ecology and the gift.

Rough South, Rural South

This book describes and discusses the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. The book starts by distinguishing Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. Other chapters begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later chapters address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners.