Read a critically acclaimed novel “Tobacco Road (1932)” written by Erskine Preston Caldwell, who was an American novelist and story writer. It is a story about poor white peasant family during the period of Great Depression in rural Georgia at the outskirts of Augusta. The author brings out the true face of the society through his writings, which one can easily read, understand and feel the pathos. He talks about the migration due to industrialization leaving behind scores of people to fend for themselves, without any resources, sleeping hungry, using snuffs to kill their hunger and society ignoring them as if they were not at all part of it and people cheating the whole year hard work worth from the gullible ones.

Quote from the book:

"The loan companies were the sharpest people he had ever had anything to do with. Once he had - secured a two-hundred-dollar loan from one of them, ….. To begin with, they came out to see him two or three times a week; some of them from the company's office would come out to the farm and try to tell him how to plant the cotton and how much guano to put in to the acre. Then on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal and charged him interest on that, too. By the time he sold his cotton in the fall, there was only seven dollars coming to him. The interest on the loan amounted to three per cent a month to start with, and at the end of ten months he had been charged thirty per cent, and on top of that another thirty per cent on the unpaid interest. Then to make sure that the loan was fully protected, Jeeter had to pay the sum of fifty dollars. He could never understand why he had to pay that, and the company did not undertake to explain it to him. When he had asked what the fifty dollars was meant to cover, he was told that it was merely the fee for making the loan. When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year's labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and mule, too. He was even then still in debt, because he owed ten dollars for the hire of the mule he had used to raise the cotton…… he discovered that he had actually lost three dollars."

The book is about abject poverty, daily fight for food, sexual longings, selfishness, racism, small needs of poor people (which the talk about day-in and day out), wretched life, which is totally ignored by the haves. Having no means to live, at the end, the poor only thinks about dying and buried in good cloths, which the fate may deny them too. One finds repetition of same thoughts of the poor after every few paras or pages, which one questions why the author has dealt the text in the manner? In my opinion, probably the author wants to depict that  the poor peasant has limited thoughts and dreams to accomplish, which time and again impinge his mind.  At times the book reminds about similar destitute characters in stories by Munshi Premchand and John Steinback.

This book was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933, and ran for eight years. A 1941 film version, deliberately played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford, and the storyline was considerably altered. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Tobacco Road number 91 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.

Source: Wikipedia

The Book is a worthwhile read.