Tobacco Road

London, The Falcon Press, 1948. 1st Edition. Near fine burgundy cloth boards in a near fine unclipped pictorial dust jacket Internally fine.

Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell about Georgia sharecroppers. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933, and ran for eight years. A 1941 film version, deliberately played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford, and the storyline was considerably altered. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Tobacco Road number 91 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil.