born Dec. 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S.
died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.
U.S. author.
Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with Tobacco Road (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. God's Little Acre (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy. He also wrote the text for documentary books with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White , whom he married.