God's Little Acre

Published a year after "Tobacco Road" in 1933, "God's Little Acre" received enormous public attention because of its lurid, licentious content. Caldwell wrote forcefully, and sometimes comically, about issues many others writers were afraid to confront: the payments extracted for giving in to one's sexual cravings, injustices everywhere in American life in the Depression years, the power of the wealthy, the necessity of labor union as the working man's only hope for self-determination. This misadventured classic revolves around Georgian patriarch, Ty Ty Walden, who is forever grasping - alternately for the gold he thinks is to be found under his fields and for a divinity within himself. Living with Ty Ty on the farm that has ceased to be farmed, are his sexually depraved daughter, Darling Jill, his obedient sons, Buck and Shaw, and Buck's wife Griselda, a beautiful, innocent temptress who inadvertently sends all men (including Ty Ty) into tailspins of sexual desire. From dawn until dark, they dig up the fields, looking for gold nuggets. Ty Ty sends for his daughter, Rosamond, who lives in South Carolina with her laid-off millworker husband, the lascivious Will Thompson, to help dig. Their arrival only causes tension. Betrayals and jealousies give fuel to the underlying tension of the family until the book's solemn conclusion.