Whose Dixie? Erskine Caldwell's Challenge to Gone with the Wind and Dialectical Realism

In September 1936 Margaret Mitchell responded to a letter from an admiring fan regarding her recently published novel, Gone with the Wind. The fan, a doctor from Ohio, had apparently asked her if she was familiar with the work of the other famous Southern writer at the time, Erskine Caldwell. "I did not see 'Tobacco Road' but I read the book," she replied, referring to Caldwell's famous Broadway play and novel: "When I read it I thought it was intended for a grand parody on the gloomy Russian novelists and I laughed almost as much as I did over 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.' Shortly afterwards, I learned it was supposed to be stark realism and must admit I was somewhat bewildered!"¹ The exact contents of the original letter from Ohio have been lost, but the fan's reference to Caldwell suggests a narrative of the South circulating on the national stage in direct competition with Gone with the Wind at that particular historical moment. Mitchell and Caldwell, to be sure, wrote from within diametrically opposed political constellations in the 1930s and 1940s, and their political positions deeply informed each of their portraits of the region. Mitchell's flippant response to Caldwell's claim to realism hints at these constellations, and more. Pitting "stark realism" against popular entertainment, Mitchell's response points to how the label of realism was necessary to authorize any ontological claims among her generation of writers. Further, she implicitly makes what I consider an accurate observation of left aesthetics; despite the recurrent advocacy of realism by the 1930s left as the only valid mode of representation, they did not always practice what they preached.

Mitchell had good reason to be flippant. Her novel and its cinematic counterpart had already begun to cement a familiar image of the South and its history in the national imagination during the 1930s and 1940s—one of bucolic plantations and fertile cotton fields, charming planters and docile slaves. Gone with the Wind was number one on the best-seller list in 1936 and 1937 and would sell more than 8.6 million copies to become one of the best sellers of the twentieth century.² Its film adaptation was perhaps even more of a critical and popular success—in 1939 it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and is still hailed as a cinematic classic. To this day, Gone with the Wind (hereafter, GWTW) has been held as the epic narrative of the South and its history among many people both inside and outside the region. As someone raised in Texas and Alabama, I remember a relative watching the film and crying when I was a child. It is the only movie I recall bringing her to tears.

It would be easy to conclude from all of this that the representation of the South put forward by GWTW achieved complete hegemony in U.S. popular culture, and further, has been hegemonic for quite some time. But the matter is much more complicated. While the popular diffusion of GWTW is widely acknowledged, much less known is that the novel was outsold for quite some time by a rival narrative of the region that has been largely forgotten: Caldwell's God's Little Acre. Published in 1933, Caldwell's story of poor white Georgia farmers and mill hands sold more than eight million copies, making it not only the most commercially successful novel on the South through the 1960s, but also the third best-selling work of fiction in the United States for the first seventy years of the twentieth century. By 1965 God's Little Acre had still outsold GWTW, and Mitchell's novel only surpassed Caldwell's sales a decade later (and only slightly at that).³ Compared to GWTW, however, the transition of God's Little Acre from page to cinematic stage proved much less remarkable. Released in 1958, the success of the film adaptation among both critics and audiences was limited at best.

The challenge God's Little Acre (hereafter, GLA) posed to GWTW is significant, for despite the...