During Caldwell's early years, Ira Caldwell served as the secretary of the A.R.P. Home Missions Board, necessitating frequent changes of location. By the time Caldwell was in high school in Wrens, a small town in northern Georgia, he had lived in various towns in Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Georgia. During his high-school years, Caldwell became interested in writing. First, he took a job with the
Jefferson Reporter, which involved writing copy, setting type, printing, and distributing the six-page local paper. When the editor refused to pay Caldwell for his work, Caldwell quit and subsequently became a stringer (part-time correspondent) for the sports editor of the
Augusta Chronicle. After several attempts to move more fully into newspaper work, Caldwell took advice from the editor of the
Macon Telegraph and returned to Wrens to discover what might be worth writing about in his own neighborhood.
Caldwell began exploring rural life around Wrens. He took day-long trips into the country with a physician, with a county tax assessor, and with his father, becoming familiar with the pockets of poverty he would describe in Tobacco Road (1932) and other novels. Just before his seventeenth birthday, Caldwell entered Erskine College.
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