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    Tobacco Road
    Tobacco Road
    Tobacco Road
    Audiobook6 hours

    Tobacco Road

    Written by Erskine Caldwell

    Narrated by Mark Hammer

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Earthy, raunchy and high spirited, this story of larkabout Jeeter Lester's struggle to keep his farm is one of the most poignant and humorous in Depression-era literature and an American classic.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 28, 2011
    ISBN9781461809647
    Tobacco Road
    Author

    Erskine Caldwell

    Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) is the author of twenty-five novels, numerous short stories, and a dozen nonfiction titles, most depicting the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. His books have been published in forty-five languages and have sold tens of millions of copies, with God’s Little Acre alone selling more than fourteen million. Caldwell’s graphic realism and unabashedly political themes earned him the scorn of critics and censors early in his career, though by the end of his life he was acknowledged as a giant of American literature.

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    Reviews for Tobacco Road

    3.5/5

    341 ratings24 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It's hard to believe there were ever any people as ignorant as the characters in this story, but who knows? I never lived in Georgia, either.
    • 2/5
      Wow. I didn't like this one at all. Too dark and depressing and cruel.
    • 4/5
      I'm coming into this story with nothing more than the title and Caldwell's introduction to guide me as to what the story is about. I was immediately perplexed as to what Caldwell was trying to do. Was he trying to publicize the plight of the poor as Steinbeck did in [book:The Grapes of Wrath|18114322] or was he doing something else?Don't get me wrong. The book is very well written but I'm not sure of the author's intentions. Early on it became apparent that his portrayal of the Lester family is exaggerated to the point of being a caricature. You can call it a work of black comedy but, if so, it is still mean spirited. I can understand why people were offended when Tobacco Road was first published.
    • 4/5
      Great book. Laughed a lot and was sad a lot. Not an easy read as the dialect made me slow down and I had to concentrate to understand what was going on. I think ,based on other reviews I have read on this book, it is either "I loved it" or "I hated it" book. Me I enjoyed it but it was not love.
    • 2/5
      If you want to read about this time period, don't waste your time with this book. Read Steinbeck instead.
    • 2/5
      Very depressing. Why should I care about characters without any redeeming quality? It is a dated work and probably gained notoriety because it was profane when published. Not worth the effort.
    • 4/5
      Title: Tobacco RoadAuthor: Erskine CaldwellGenre: American FictionPublisher: New York, Charles Scribner’s SonsDate: 1932Pages: 241Modern Library: The Board’s List #91Started: 21 August 2013I have had this book tucked away on a shelf with its pristine cover for several years now. I used to belong to The First Edition Library and would purchase a book or two a month until they went out of business. At least I think they went out of business. My copy is a facsimile of the first edition. I never did amass the personal library of my dreams but this book is a keeper. When I’m done with it, I will return it to its place on my shelf to rest until I need it again.Here are a few interesting points about this book and the author:~ When it came out in 1932 it sold for $2.50.~ When Caldwell sent his typed final version of the book to Max Perkins at Scribners it was accepted for print within ten days and required no editing. Imagine that – every T crossed on the first go ’round, that’s pretty amazing.~ Tobacco Road was Caldwell’s first and most renowned novel.Okay, I’m headed to Georgia to hang out with the Lester family for a while. I’ll check back in later.You might have noticed that I didn’t chime in part way through this book like I usually do. There was no need because the story line never changes. The Lester family, along with Lov and Sister Bessie are so poverty-stricken that survival is their only thought, well – that and sex. Jeeter Lester is a white share-cropper, and the head of the Lester family that lives along the tobacco road. The story revolves around the happenings at the Lester household and the occasional trip away from the property. The repetitiveness of Caldwell’s writing style reiterates the truth of the Lester’s starvation and desperation over and over again on each of the 241 pages of this book. Caldwell makes you want to keep reading, if for nothing else to see what catastrophe Jeeter’s laziness and lack of common sense will bring upon the family next.If you need to pound out a classic I do suggest you grab Tobacco Road. It’s sad, it’s short, there is a small amount of humor, and in its own odd way it will keep you interested to the last page. This novel will also give you a good feel for southern literature and what it was like for poor white America during the depression.Oh, and there are turnips and a couple of cases of vehicular homicide that are sure to please. (In a grotesque sort of way.) Enjoy!Finished: 31 August 2013
    • 3/5
      Depressing.
    • 1/5
      I feel like I need to get a time machine to write a proper review of this book. I am astounded to see, "The most famous novel by the world's bestselling novelist" on the cover of my Signet paperback (with its 25 cent cover price!) How could Caldwell have been so popular, and what was it about this story that made the book sell millions of copies and even be turned into a Broadway play that lasted seven years?Is the story supposed to be funny? Is it a farce? I don't think so. It is not a story about "characters" who do stupid things. It is a story filled with grotesques, and watching them go about their "lives" is truly painful for the reader. There isn't much good you can say about any of them. The only one who has a job is also married to a 12-year old, for instance. The only saving grace is that Caldwell writes well. The story doesn't get bogged down with ridiculous Southern dialect. All the horror just unfolds neatly as you read along.And horror would be fine if the story had a point. As a Southerner myself, I can't help but feel that Caldwell had the same mixed emotions about the South that many of us do--or maybe Caldwell's weren't mixed at all. There is a hatred and venom that runs through the book that is pretty hard to hide. The fact that Caldwell never lived in the South after reaching manhood tells me that, unlike Faulkner, he was incapable of recognizing both the good and the bad of his native region. Perhaps that is why Faulkner will never be forgotten, and Caldwell, largely, already is.This still doesn't explain why anyone, Northern or Southern, was so fascinated with this sordid tale. Perhaps in the 1930s, in the midst of depression and hardship, it was a relief to watch a group of people who had it worse--much worse--than the reader.
    • 4/5
      Funny and heartbreaking and, despite the satire, still so very true. Also oddly relevant to our current times. For me the best comic novels are rooted in the profoundly tragic. It is a hard line to walk, but Caldwell holds his own for the most part. Not perfect, but close enough.
    • 3/5
      Not nearly so good as I had remembered.
    • 3/5
      I just finished rereading Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. I must have read this novel when I was in high school or college. I remembered only the locale and the general tone of the book, and the names of a couple of the characters. However, the book has enjoyed both fame and noteriety over the years, and I wanted to see what it was I had read. It would have been half a century ago, so I could forgive myself for not being able to resurrect more of its substance.I wonder how it would fare in literature course today, not well, I think. Certainly both the religious conservative and the political correctnik would find much to appall them. The novel deals with the more or less final days of a white Southern family, the Lesters, which over the generations has slipped to the level of sharecropper, and lives in abject, brutalizing poverty. The characters are so wretched for the most part that it is hard to feel the milk of human kindness flooding in their direction, largely because they are without love or mercy for each other. I think that in several respects it could be compared to Liam O'Flaherty's novel Famine. Perhaps the most significant difference is that in Caldwell's book the land's refusal to support the people has gone on long enough to rot out any better natures the Lesters might have had; whereas Flaherty's impoverished family goes to its doom more rapidly, and the total decay of their characters is forestalled by wholesale death.If you allow yourself (and I did) there is dark, dark humor in some of the family's grotesque in-fighting, and the night that the preacher woman, Sister Bessie, spends in a city "hotel" with her teenage husband and his father is handled in a deadpan manner that almost dares the reader to smirk. What comes through with increasingly clarity as the short novel progresses is that the land itself has ruined these people, though not so much the wasted, worn soil as the protagonist's tenacious refusal to give it up. To the bitter-most final pages he is enduring in his belief that this land is his salvation. And when it is not, in the most grusome way imaginable, this makes the book's final sentence, spoken by his teenage son a mind-boggling return to novel's beginning.For those who would find Tobacco Road like eating glass, I would suggest reading his childhood memoir, Deep South. It is Caldwell's early years in the old segregated, provincial South as the son of a minister. It is a fine, fine book, and elegiac in its tone and simple nobility. It is not a book about religion, but rather one about the dignity and love that can sometimes be found in ordinary, unassuming people
    • 4/5
      I’m really not sure what I think. It’s a really short book, but at a third of the way through I still wasn’t interested and thought it was pretty dull and silly parody of Southerners. Then it got weird.

      This is a book that’s not easy to pigeonhole, and it’s full of contradictions. It’s dark, yet funny. He seems to completely belittle, mock and insult the characters (who are all awful), and somehow makes it seem like they're responsible for all their own problems while also showing sympathy and how the system fails them, and how hard it is for them to get ahead. I read an article about the book that said "Was the novel a cry for social justice, or a nasty satire?" I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I think it was both.

      It was like a weird cross of The Grapes of Wrath and A Confederacy of Dunces, except much meaner and stranger. I keep thinking about the book, so I guess it’s getting 4 stars.
    • 3/5
      Book Circle Reads 148Rating: 3* of fiveThe Book Description: University of Georgia Press's sales copy--Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.My Review: Ye gods and little fishes! Talk about "been down so long it looks like up to me!"A shockingly honest book when it was published in 1932, it's still a picture that comparatively rich urban Americans need to see. The details have changed only a little in 80 years. This kind of poverty not only still exists, but these horrific racial prejudices do too. Read Knockemstiff and The Galaxie and Other Rides and American Salvage for the modern-day honest storytellers mining the same vein of American life. Winter's Bone is its direct descendant! So many of the works I've labeled hillbilly noir...and this is the granddaddy of 'em all. I loved the fact that it was so grim when I first read it as an angry, angsty teen, and it still, or again, aroused my loathing and ire when re-read last year at 52.I can't remember not thinking that people were vile, irredeemable scum, and reading books like this taught me I wasn't the first to have this insight. Even the best are brought low by the vicious kicks of a merciless gawd. They keep going to church, though, to get kicked again...ultimately the solace of "at least we're not black" (though they use the other word I can't stand even to type) isn't enough to overcome the characters' various phobias and anxieties.This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!A megaton of misery detonating in your brain, leaving craters a mile wide for compassion to leak out of.
    • 3/5
      For a real life view, read "Such as Us....A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. Caldwell was simply angry about the conditions of the poor and the callousness of the rich.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot about "Tobacco Road" that hasn't aged particularly well. The book's unflinching portrayal of Southern poverty might be, in its own way, commendable, but the author's occasional commentary -- at one point he informs the reader that collective agriculture and modern farming methods might have rescued his characters from their fates -- seems a little clumsy now. Likewise, for a man who can't read or write, Jeeter Lester seems uncannily articulate when he describes the economic factors that have contributed to his predicament. His family, the broke, starving, Lester clan, come off as the ur-hillbillies, but I'm sure that this is one stereotype that most modern Southerners would gladly put behind them. What's left, then? The Lesters' desires: to farm, to work, or just to survive, do come through loud and clear, and it's genuinely difficult to watch them struggle. There's also Jeeter's malevolent, bullying self-pitying presence that throws a long shadow over the entire book and makes him one of the most unpleasant villains I've met in a while. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, "Tobacco Road" presents a chilling vision of a sort of alternate America -- one that twentieth-century middle class prosperity and typically American notions of self-reinvention hardly acknowledged. America's not the promised land for everyone, and we don't all do better than our parents, and Caldwell's novel seems to want to offer up its characters as living proof of this sad reality.
    • 3/5
      A precursor to God's Little Acre, much more reportorial in style, about the Lester family, slowly starving to death on their meager land in Georgia cotton country. Jeeter Lester is lazy, hopeless, and hungry, with little or no vision of a way out of his plight. He and his wife have had 17 children, 12 of them presumably living, although all but two have left home and none have sent word of their progress. One is known to have done well nearby. One, 12 year old Pearl, has recently been married off to a neighbor, but has resisted becoming a wife. Jeeter's mother hangs on to life grimly, with no help and definite hindrance from the rest of the family.The Depression, and the hopelessness it engendered, has never been more grimly portrayed, although other stories allow the reader to like to characters at least a little.
    • 2/5
      Throughout the reading of this book my mouth was agape. I really tried to like these characters and feel for their plight during the depression era in the deep south but it was just more than I think I could force upon myself. The level of ignorance was just incredible and the repeatative nature of the dialouge made me want to scream. If I never hear the words "seed cotton and guano" I will die a much happier person.
    • 2/5
      this book was acclaimed as 'fully realistic' and 'funny like Mark Twain' on the back...i have to disagree. i honestly have a hard time believing in a group of people this stupid. i did laugh, once. i almost felt like this was written as a cruel stereotype of southern people...prehaps i just didn't get it.
    • 4/5
      My introduction to Erskine Caldwell, who detested such epithets as 'white trash' used here. Yes, there are grotesque, deformed people , sex-crazed and insanely violent. But this is on a cartoon level, as though the protagonists are playing caricatures of themselves, while all around the wasted land of opportunity serves to mimic the deadness of their lives.
    • 1/5
      Initially, I thought this would be a sad tale of misery, like [The Beans of Egypt, Maine], but about 20 pages in, I realized that it is dark comedy. It portrays a family of down-and-out farmers in Georgia, and the community that surrounds them, an extended joke on poor country rubes. If you find desperate poverty, ignorance, failure, disappointment, physical deformity, pedophilia, ageism and cruelty humorous, dig in. I hated it.The book has been compared to [Mark Twain], but what Twain and also [Herman Charles Boseman] wrote about country folks was truly humorous, perhaps because they had a gram of compassion for their characters.
    • 3/5
      it is difficult to believe there are people this ignorant in the world, but erkine caldwell brings us into their world (not that we want to spend much time in it)and, mostly through narrative repetition, he stamps us there. over and over and over and over again we are told by jeeter all he wants to do is grow crops, bessie wants to get laid, and the grandmother is a non-entity, completely ignored so much that when she is run over by bessie's car, her face mashed in, she is left alone to suffer and die. nobody even walks up and looks at heer! if you don't believe we descended from apes, read caldwell.And for those of you who say this is a farce (quoting some New Yawk times fellow or such), let me tell you it surely is not a farce. It is real as I have met some of the people. Poverty doesn't breed grace, necessarily, nor does scrapping for food bring brotherly love, espite the romantic proclamations of the politically correct.
    • 4/5
      Is Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell meant to be taken seriously or is it a comedic tour de force? I read the book cold-turkey. This is how I like to describe a book in which I lack prior knowledge of plot, characterization, or theme. I merely pick the book up to try a new author or in this case I liked the title.I was halfway through the book before I stopped to read the small bio, brief description, and critic comments located on the back cover. The New York Herald Tribune claims, “Mr. Caldwell’s humor, like Mark Twain’s, has as its source an imagination that stirs the emotions of the reader.”Ah, Mark Twain(ish) humor, it is supposed to be funny. That changes everything! The characters and their disregard for human life, other than their own, was a little disheartening to read. Knowing now that it is a farce, allows me to really enjoy the story full of unbelievable characters.Leading the role for most unbelievable is main character, Jeeter, patriarch of the Lester family. Jeeter is all about Jeeter. He even shoos his own mother from the dinner table. Ada, his wife and producer of 17 children, is a quiet woman, but lately, “hunger has loosened her tongue,” and made her a trite annoying. All of the children except for Dude, 16, and Ellie May, 17, have left home for the big city of Augusta, Georgia and its cotton mills. The youngest child, Pearl, 12, was traded to Lov Bensey for food. Grandmother Lester is allowed to haunt the house as long as she stays out of the way. The family actually wills her to wither and blow away.The book was originally published in 1932, and the timeline is concurrent with the Depression. The Lesters have become sharecroppers on their own original Lester land after Jeeter squanders their assets with fraudulent home loans. As the story opens the family is subsiding on corn meal, snuff, and chicory, while Grandmother Lester forages off the land.I am so thankful this book is comedic in nature. Not, laugh-track, ha-ha funny such as Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres, but rather a relief these aren’t real people. The character Elly May Clampett is way more forgiving to the eyes than poor, hair-lipped Ellie May Lester. Oh, and how misleading is the title, where’s the tobacco?
    • 4/5
      enjoyed it very much, nicely written tale of poor farmers trying to make ends meet. everytime i read a book like this, i want to kick anyone who talks crap about "southern hillbillies" or things like that.