Erskine Caldwell, God's Little Acre

Christopher Rieger (Southeast Missouri State University)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1933

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

God’s Little Acre is Erskine Caldwell’s follow-up novel to Tobacco Road (1932), and it is considered by most critics to be Caldwell’s finest novel. While Tobacco Road illustrates the death of the pastoral ideal in Southern agriculture, God’s Little Acre continues Caldwell’s critique of the sharecropping and cotton farming while also investigating the textile mill as a possible replacement or positive alternative for Southern workers. While the novel is often categorized as proletarian fiction, it is perhaps better thought of as social protest fiction, since Caldwell is more interested in exposing class oppression and exploitative working conditions than he is in offering socialist or communist …

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1038 words

Citation: Rieger, Christopher. "God's Little Acre". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 July 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4954, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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