Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is by turns comic, tragic and sickening – a paean of sorts to small farmers and their love of the land and an indictment of the forces crushing them. Published in 1932, the same year as Light in August, this novel is a stylistic 180 degrees away from William Faulkner's tale. The sentences are simple, with large blocks of dialogue in which characters repeat themselves as if they have to drum their thoughts into their own heads to make them real. Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of the family, has seen most of his children married off or die; there remains a wife, a daughter, a dim son, and a grandmother who wanders around unnoticed until she is run over by a car. Jeeter talks incessantly about the need to get seed, guano, and a mule to plant his cotton crop, but his credit has run out and the family is quietly starving, relying on snuff to stave off hunger. There is no nobility here, except perhaps in the immolation of the coda.
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