Conversations with Erskine Caldwell
contains thirty-two interviews with this major writer, who during his long career enjoyed both the celebrity and the controversy that his books generated. These collected interviews include what is apparently his first, given in 1929 before the publication of
The Bastard
, to one of the very last, given only weeks before his death in April 1987.
Caldwell was a lifelong outspoken opponent of censorship and an early advocate of racial equality. His ideas were reflected in a number of important interviews and portraits, often in newspapers or small journals not easily obtained today. In his later years he became a kind of elder statesman, celebrated as the last of that extraordinary generation of American writers which included Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Steinbeck and which changed the face of American literature.
The interviews in this collection reveal Caldwell’s attitudes toward the profession of writing. He describe