Reading the reviews for Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell (first published in 1932) I was struck by how many current readers were put off by the subject matter - i.e. poor white farmers in Georgia during the Depression. Many readers on Goodreads.com gave the novel only one star (*) while others recognized how the author was trying to paint a tragic portrait of a somewhat neglected class in American society. Caldwell was, if nothing else, relentlessly honest in his depiction of brutish, impulsive, desperate victims of hard times who often behaved erratically and irrationally to their own detriment.
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