Tobacco Road Paperback – 31 Jan. 2014

The novel is engrossing, pacey, compelling and tragi-comic. It's an engaging, potentially depressing story of poor sharecroppers in the 30s, with large doses of black humour to lift the mood.There are numerous mis-spellings, typos and punctuation mistakes in this printed version.

Tobacco Road is the story of the Lesters, a family of sharecroppers living through a kind of end-stage poverty in 1930s America. It’s an incredibly harsh book. The humorous touches during the worst moments only provide the kind of light relief that casts a dark shadow.So what to make of it. I wondered if this was an expose book, helping readers become aware of the reality of extreme poverty. There’s probably something in that. I also wondered if the book was a morality tale showing what happens if you’re lazy and refuse to move with the times. There’s probably something in that too. Overall, however, I thought this was a book reflecting on the vagaries of human need.Well-fed psychologists in fancy universities would say that there is a hierarchy of need. People must meet their basic physical needs first, for food, shelter and reproduction. Ever more rarefied needs come later as the demands of each succeeding level are met. Things are not that simple in Tobacco Road. The story appears to exist right at the bottom of the hierarchy of need. The Lesters are starving and need food. Their shelter is falling apart. However, it is only a short jump between starvation and spiritual concerns. Jeeter Lester eats a few stolen turnips. As soon as his hunger pangs have settled, he is turning to spiritual justifications for his actions. Bessie, the bizarre preacher, eats those same stolen turnips while fulminating in fiery religious terms against the sin of theft. So what could I make of that? The desperate theft of food and comforts of religion go hand in hand. Religion is like a turnip.There are other bizarre jumps around the hierarchy of need. While reproduction is usually right there at the basic level, we watch Lov trying to ignore an ugly girl who is more than keen to give him as many babies as he likes. He is ensnared by the airy charms of her younger sister who has pretty hair, but won't let Lov near her. There are also strange judgements about priorities when fate occasionally brings opportunity. Bessie spends her entire inheritance of eight hundred dollars on a luxurious car, when that money could have saved the family if she had spent it on the necessities of farming. Similarly the daughters of the Lester family flee to the near-by city of Augusta not to earn money for food, but because they are attracted by the prospect of fashionable clothes. Then there is Jeeter himself, who puts the need to stay working his land before anything, even eating.So what do people need in Tobacco Road? What is the answer to their problems? Every time I tried to answer that question, put a simple moral on the story, the book would wriggle away and say something else.In the end, I kept coming back to the blackjack tree. Throughout the book, Jeeter is trying to sell the one thing that grows on his exhausted land, the unwanted, unworkable, unburnable, iron-hard wood of the blackjack tree: “a stunted variety of oak that used its sap in toughening the fibres instead of growing new layers and expanding the old, as other trees did.” Clearly, Jeeter is like the blackjack tree. He does not grow new layers or expand the old. He is just as useless and unworkable. Nevertheless, the blackjack is enduring, and in the end it will probably be the last thing standing.

A novel about poor white farmers in the America South of the 1930's.Trigger warning: IT IS NOT STEINBECK. One of the most depressing and uncomfortable books I've ever read. After about half way through I didn't want to pick it up again, because I knew I would be reading another appalling, tragic event in the lives of the hapless heroes.The novel starts with a man going to his father in law to complain that his thirteen year old wife won't have sex with him. He has walked seven miles carrying a sack of turnips, and by the end of the episode the father in law has stolen the turnips and has run off to the woods to eat them. Meanwhile the man with the sack doesn't care, because he's having sex in the road with the thief's elder daughter.At that point, I thought I was getting a picaresque romp, but I was wrong.It didn't get easier, and there is no humour at all in this, just ignorance, poverty and stupidity.I recommend it, but don't complain to me if it makes you feel bad.

At 180 pages this is not a long read but it is an extremely interesting story which demands your attention throughout.The story is set in the Deep South, Georgia, during the great depression - 1929 -1939?Jeeter Lester has farming in his blood and is a man of the countryside who's not prepared to go anywhere else for work, even though he has none. He does a lot of thinking about work, but strapped for cash and living in poverty its years since he actually did anything other than bemoan his bad luck. Jeeter lives with his useless teenage son Dude, his faithful wife Ada, daughter, Ellie May, who unfortunately has a cleft lip & Grandma Lester who is constantly ignored by all. They are all penniless & starving.Lov Bensey is Jeeter's son in law, having married Jeeter's 12 year old daughter Pearl! This doesn't stop Jeeter from bushwhacking him for his hard earned sack of parsnips, which he has just completed a 9 mile hike to get!Into the story comes Bessie who is a self-proclaimed preacher of uncertain character!The story has some great characters, is delightfully put together, very dead pan and witty, though ultimately quite sad and thought provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would especially recommend it to those who enjoy reading about the Deep South.

A terrible, flimsy, booklet style copy of what is probably an excellent book. I immediately gave it to a local charity shop as I couldn't read it in this format.

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932.It tells 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.Shocking, graphic, heartbreaking, bleak, often humorous, in a brilliant way. I can clearly see why Erskine Caldwell is regarded as a literary giant in the American psyche.

What a strange mixture of events from, what now is to us is another world. It makes you think of their wretched lives as something we could never endure but they had little choice. The book was also, surprisingly, explicit when dealing with sexual issues. Well worth reading by anyone interested in this period of American history.

I’ve only given this 3 stars because of the poor print quality in this copy. Spelling, punctuation and bad formatting everywhere in the book. The novel itself however was gripping.