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Tobacco Road (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

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Tobacco Road, Caldwell's fourth novel (counting The Bogus Ones, discovered in 1978), remains the book for which he is best remembered. Narrated in an episodic fashion, it quickly reveals more of theme and meaning than would a more organically developed effort. In Tobacco Road, Jeeter Lester and his wife, Ada, live in a decaying cabin with his silent mother and two of their fifteen children, the hare-lipped Ellie May and her younger brother Dude. Like the tobacco road on which they live, once a means of delivering hogsheads of tobacco to the Savannah River, and like...

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