Erskine Caldwell Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Wayne Mixon

Critical Essay by Wayne Mixon

SOURCE: “Changing South, Unchanging Writer: Caldwell in Decline—and in Resurgence,” in The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 118-54.

In the following essay, Mixon argues that Caldwell's later works were less successful than his early writing because he failed to recognize major social changes in the American South.

In the course of a relationship that lasted for six years, three as illicit lovers and three as husband and wife, Caldwell and Bourke-White collaborated to produce four books, two of which dealt with people in the United States. Late in 1940, they set out on a cross-country journey that resulted in a book much different from You Have Seen Their Faces. Say, Is This the U.S.A. is a hodge-podge that lacks the unity of the earlier collaboration. Appearing when Americans were passionately engaged in debate over their country's response to war in Europe, the...
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