Caldwell, Erskine Preston (1903–1987)

US novelist. He achieved great popular success with Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). These were vivid, bawdy depictions of poverty-stricken Southern sharecroppers in the Depression, which bordered on sensationalist melodrama. His literary autobiography, Call It Experience, was published 1951.

Born in White Oak, Georgia, Caldwell travelled with his father, a minister, and worked among poor whites in the South as a cotton picker. He was married to photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, who collaborated with him on three books, notably You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), about the rural South. His other works include Trouble in July (1940) and Georgia Boy (1943).