December 17, 2003

Caldwell Centenary

Today is the centennial of Erskine Caldwell's birth and the New York Times has a profile of the author.

"I knew what I wanted to write and what I wanted to write about," he once recalled. "I wanted to write about the people I knew as they really lived, moved, and talked."
Using Maine as his base, Caldwell began what became the lifelong habit of writing a story a week. Unlike most aspiring novelists of the Jazz Age, Caldwell was unafraid to bring crude sexuality and barnyard humor into his fiction.

Read the full article here.

posted by Laila Lalami at 07:45 PM