Rating: 
Summary: Better than a big ole sack o'turnips
Review: This book is a hoot. Even if you've never known anyone like
the Lesters and their cohorts, they seem completely believable.
Rating: 
Summary: It Apparently Took One To Describe One
Review: This entertaining story is noteworthy because (among other attributes) it so perfectly nails the defeatist, do-nothing psyche of someone who believes there can be no reward from personal industry -- the Jeter Lesters of the world who continually blame someone or something else for their problems, while constantly wishing the old captain would show up and give them some snuff. It's ironic that Caldwell could so accurately describe the logical product of communism, the Jeter Lester family, while being a leftist himself. Was he proud of their lifestyle, or what?
Rating:
Summary: ignorance, selfishness, and hunger
Review: This is a book that oscillates from very comic to deeply tragic. While reading it, I at times began to feel very frustrated and saddened by the Lesters' plight, but in the next instant something so outrageous or unbelievable happened that it jolted me from contemplating this book as reality and made it more into something of a farce. It is amazing the way this book can convey both tragedy and comedy in that way. The Lesters are exploited by the society that they live in, but at the same time they are equally ruined by their own complete lack of intelligence. It is hard to imagine more ignorant and selfish people...do such people really exist? This book is a very entertaining, disturbing, and thought-provoking work.
Rating: 
Summary: A trashy novel about trashy people.
Review: This is one of those novels that college professors value so highly. Erskin Caldwell was an expert at using coloquialisms and minimalist style to create word pictures that are hard to get out of your mind. He was a gifted southern writer who achieved much acclaim everywhere but in his native South. In the middle and south Georgia counties around Wrens, GA, the area depicted in TOBACCO ROAD, Caldwell's is a name that is still not mentioned in polite company.
As far as representing depression era Southern reality TOBACCO ROAD was no more true to life in 1933 than it would be today. The Lester Family never existed and people in the rural South didn't live as the novel depicts them, at least no one I know did. Novels like this one and GOD'S LITTLE ACRE, also by Caldwell, reenforced a prejudiced opinion of this area of the country that is still held by many. We Southerners have been trying to correct this erroneous perception ever since.
The area around Augusta, GA is nothing like that which is depicted in Caldwell's novel. It never was. I know. I live there.
Rating:
Summary: A tale of desperation and self-interest
Review: This tragic and at times humorous tale of Jeeter Lester and his dysfunctional family has become part of American Culture. The characters may not be as famous as the Joads but how often have you heard the derisive term "Tobacco Road" used? Read this book and you'll realize that you've probably been understating the image of Tobacco Road. Rarely do we get such a portrait of despair, poverty, and self-interest. It is a wonderfully written book that reminds me somewhat of the works of Steinbeck in his depiction of the poor or down-and-out. Steinbeck, however, allowed his characters some nobility. Caldwell strips away any notion that the Lesters are noble.
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Summary: Downe On The Farm
Review: Tobacco Road documents the last days in the lives of Jeeter and Ada Lester, poverty-stricken and permanently befuddled sharecroppers living in rural Georgia during the Great Depression. Both a comedy and a tragedy, the book, almost a folk carnival of sorts, is hilarious and strangely uplifting from beginning to end. The tragic element, barely discernable but slowly advancing throughout the course of the book, strikes sharply and rapidly at the characters and the reader in quick lunges before vanishing again beneath the brilliant comic surface. The novel has a archetypal framework: Patriarch Jeeter, dispossessed of his ancestral land, upon which nothing will now grow but broom sedge and scrub oak, perpetually dreams of bringing his dead and depleted soil to new life. While musing on his farm's infertility and future, and when not lusting after the women around him, Jeeter--father of twelve--is simultaneously preoccupied with ending his own ability to reproduce via self-castration. Like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, habitually procrastinating Jeeter is continually hamstrung and locked in the stupefying moment. Caldwell is particularly cruel in drawing his female characters: simple-minded and otherwise beautiful daughter Ellie May has a disfiguring harelip; man-crazy, self-appointed preacher Bessie has a good figure but no nose (the other characters are fascinated with trying to see how far down her open-holed nostrils they can peer), the unnamed, silent grandmother is starved out by the other family members who will no longer acknowledge her; struggling, hungry and forward-looking wife Ada, who has not always been faithful, dreams only of having a dress of correct length and current style to be buried in; and twelve year-old child bride Pearl has lost the will to speak and sleeps on a pallet on the floor to avoid her adult husband's sexual advances. In contrast, Jeeter and handsome teenage son Dude are merely imbecilic, gullible, and grossly but unknowingly selfish. All of the characters are God-fearing and largely well-intentioned towards one another, though uneducated and of extremely limited consciousness. Therefore, they are guiltless of malice if not of responsibility. In a scene which may offend some of today's readers, newlyweds Dude and Bessie accidently kill a black man and think nothing of it. But this blank, spontaneous indifference to reality and the reality of other people is what makes the book funny. The ancient grandmother meets a painful and grueling death through another careless accident with the car; Jeeter rudely discusses Ellie May's disfigurement with her without the slightest awareness of her emotional reaction; Bessie, perpetually in heat, nearly rapes unwilling, unresponsive, 16 year-old Dude; car salesmen gather to stare down Bessie's nostril holes and insult her; Jeeter attacks his son-in-law and steals the bag of turnips he walked has seven miles to buy; Ellie May masturbates openly in the front yard; the whole family gathers, tribe-like, to watch Dude and Bessie make awkward love on their wedding day; then communally destroy a new (and totem-like symbol of the modern, productive, urbanized world they will never be a part of) automobile within a few days due to recklessness and the family curse of being unable to respect and maintain anything. Like many of the characters in Muriel Spark's novels, the cast of Tobacco Road are only vaguely aware, if aware at all, of themselves as moral, spiritual or ethical beings, despite the flimsy religious trappings around them. This lack of moral awareness "and the comedy that arises from it" is what fuels Tobacco Road. Caldwell has written the lightest of black comedies, and it is to his credit that he is capable of making the reader embrace and enjoy these occasionally vigorous lost souls, even as the reader senses there will be only grief ahead for all. The universal success of Tobacco Road in 1932 (the novel was made into a long-running Broadway play, and a toned-down John Ford film) gave new, 20th-Century life to the country bumpkin genre, which in turn gave birth to the Ma And Pa Kettle films, the Li'l Abner comic strip, some of Tennessee William's short stories and plays, and classic American television series the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Despite the many ways in which sexual intentions go awry in the book, it has a natural, healthy approach to sexuality, as did Caldwell's next novel, God's Little Acre. In our age of political correctness and sexual lockdown, the book's vibrant, sexuality-as-a-given attitude is stirring. Some Southerners, at the time of its publication and continuing through to the present, have objected to the book as an indictment of Southern culture and an insult to its people. This charge is groundless, as the book is clearly a soulful high comedy, and its characters strictly caricatures, which could easily be converted into present-day, inner-city poor, Californian migrant workers, Alaskan trappers, or a suburban blue-collar family with the same results, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or age. Ultimately, Tobacco Road is a novel which seductively illuminates and instructs while it seamlessly entertains. Hats off to the University of Georgia Press for courageously rescuing Caldwell from oblivion, understanding his work in context, and bringing the best of his work to the public in these handsome volumes.
Rating:
Summary: Tobacco Road hits too close to home.
Review: Tobacco Road is an important, if not uplifting story that should have broad appeal. Being from the rural south, I struggle with the image stereotypical poor southerner, but, the Lesters make for a compelling composite of the worst elements of southern poverty. Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" makes for a compelling comparison and contrast to "Tobacco Road". Personally, I prefer "The Good Earth".
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Summary: Hardscrabble realism...or is it?
Review: Tobacco Road is, and has repeatedly been, billed as a novel that shows, through realism, the dark and foolish underside of the poor in the south during the 1920s-40s. I disagree with that evaluation greatly. As far as the writing itself goes, the novel is wonderful. It is clear, hard, sharp writing that defines relationships, develops characters (one-dimensionally, but that is more than most fiction does) and maintains a unified plot (yes, plot - this book does have one - the quest of Jeeter Lester to escape the emptiness and aimlessness of his portrayed life). The writing does belong to the realist school in that it defines emotion primarily through action, rather than through introspection (and given the characterizations in the book - that would be a necessity) and it takes pains to expose the dark side of the protagonists' (are there any?) lives. What bothers me about it is the lack of "realism" in the events and personalities portrayed. I've known (and come from) people of similar socio-economic circumstances and while they aren't literary giants - they aren't the amoral sociopaths displayed here either. I've also known people like those portrayed here - but never in a single "group", rather they have been spread thin throughout a population; and as for the amorality - leaving aside the stupidity - I've seen that at all socioeconomic levels. While the book does have the merit of captivating the reader, it seems to "protest too much" in its goal to direct attention at the milieu of poverty and evil in the place and time it is set in. I recommend it and have no quarrel with its style, merely its substance. Kelly Whiting
Rating:
Summary: AWESOME
Review: TOBACCO ROAD WAS A REAL EYE OPENER. SOMETIMES IT IS EASY TO FORGET THAT WE ARE THE MOST SPOILED GENERATION THAT HAS EVER LIVED. ESPECIALLY HERE IN AMERICA WE REALLY TAKE THINGS FOR GRANTED. IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE NOT KNOWING WHERE YOUR NEXT MEAL IS COMING FROM. THIS BOOK REALLY MADE ME SEE WHAT MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WERE TALKING ABOUT WHEN THEY TOLD STORIES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION.
Rating:
Summary: funny and bizarre
Review: Tobacco Road was a skillfully written novel that acurately protrayed suffering during the Great Depression. It showed how selfish people become when they are fighting to survive. An obvious example of this fact is Old Mother Lester. Everyone was waiting, even hoping, for her to die so they could have more food and not have to think of her anymore. When Dude backed the car into her, no one was even concerned. This novel really showed how cruel the world is sometimes.
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