Fine Literature & Modern Firsts

CALDWELL, Erskine (1903–1987). God’s Little Acre. New York: The Viking Press, 1933. 8vo. Original publisher’s black cloth stamped in green and yellow, orange top edge; original unclipped dust jacket (short closed tears discretely repaired verso, few tiny spots of dust soiling or staining to front panel, else fine); morocco–backed clamshell box. FIRST EDITION of the author’s finest novel and sequel to Tobacco Road, critiquing sharecropping and cotton farming while investigating the textile mill as an alternative for Southern workers. “Both books were set among the poor whites of [Caldwell's] southern childhood, and both displayed a mixture of muckraking anger and grotesque sexual behavior that upset southern loyalists and northern moralists alike. Despite or because of this, . . . God's Little Acre, after a highly publicized obscenity trial, became one of Caldwell's perennial bestsellers.” (ANB). INSCRIBED BY CALDWELL on half–title: “For = / Ingle Barr / Here is a book / you should read / some day = / Erskine Caldwell”. Barr was a California collector who scheduled business trips and vacations so that he could meet the authors in person, bringing books along to be signed. His library was sold en bloc at Sotheby Parke Bernet in Los Angeles in 1973.