Brown Thrasher Books Series

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South—from South Carolina to Arkansas—to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years.

Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

Journeyman

by Erskine Caldwell

Published 28 January 1972

Written immediately following ""Tobacco Road"" and ""God's Little Acre"", this novel introduces one of Erskine Caldwell's most memorable characters: the philandering, murderous itinerant preacher, Semon Dye. Part allegory, part tall tale, and with a good measure of old frontier humour, ""Journeyman"" tells of a stranger, as devilish as he is divine, who mysteriously arrives in Rocky Comfort, Georgia, and, inside of a week, nearly tears the small community apart. Helping Rocky Comfort's citizens to rationalise their vices and weaknesses, Semon Dye then uses their flaws to his own advantage. Offering no forgiveness for their actions and no justification for his own, he confronts the people of Rocky Comfort with their own sins as he gambles, drinks, carouses and fights along with them. Culminating in a tumultuous, ecstatic revival, ""Journeyman"" is filled with insights into human nature and the physical and emotional components of religious fervour. This volume reprints the complete text of ""Journeyman"" as it was first published, before the more widely circulated edition, expurgated in the aftermath of the legal battles waged against ""God's Little Acre"" was released.

In Search of Bisco

by Erskine Caldwell

Published 30 September 1995

In 1965, more than five decades after his forced estrangement from his black boyhood friend Bisco, Erskine Caldwell set out across the South to find him. On the journey, which took him from South Carolina to Arkansas, Caldwell spoke to many people on the pretense of asking Bisco's whereabouts: a black college professor in Atlanta, Georgia; a white real estate salesman in Demopolis, Alabama; a black sharecropper in the Yazoo Basin of the Mississippi Delta; a transplanted white New England housewife in Bastrop, Louisiana; and others. Eighteen of those conversations, with Caldwell's commentary, make up this book.

Caldwell made his journey at the zenith of the civil rights movement. Bisco, whom Caldwell never found, becomes a symbol for the South's race problem, to which he sought an answer in the emotions, experiences, and attitudes of those he encountered.