Caldwell was born in a house in a wooded area outside Moreland, Georgia, the son of a minister of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. During his early childhood he was relocated from state to state across the South, as his father found jobs in various churches.

Later, he attended, but did not graduate from Erskine College. He was six feet tall, athletic, and played football. His political sympathies were with the working class, and he used his experiences with common workers to write books that extolled the simple life of those less fortunate than he was. Later in life, he gave seminars on low-income tenant-sharecroppers in the American South.

His first and second published works were Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930) but the works for which he is most famous are his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933).

When his first book was published, it was banned and copies were seized by authorities. Later, with the publication of God's Little Acre, authorities, at the instigation of the New York Literary Society (apparently incensed at Caldwell's choice of title), arrested Caldwell and seized his copies when he went to New York for a book-signing event. A trial exonerated Caldwell, and he counter-sued for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

Through the 1930s, Caldwell and his wife Helen managed a bookstore in Maine. Caldwell was married to photographer Margaret Bourke-White from 1939 to 1942, and they collaborated on three photo-documentaries: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), North of the Danube (1939), and Say, Is This The USA (1941).

During World War II, Caldwell obtained papers from the USSR that allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent documenting the war effort there. Disillusionment with the intrigues of the Stalinist regime caused him to compose a four page short story, "Message for Genevieve," published on returning to the United States during 1944. In this story, a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on charges of espionage.

After he returned from World War II, Caldwell began residence in San Francisco. His ex-wife kept the bookstore in Maine as a property settlement.

During the last twenty years of his life, he got into the habit of traveling around the world for six months of each year, and he took with him notebooks in which to jot down his ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published, but can be examined in a museum dedicated to him.The house in which he was born was moved from its original site and preserved, and was made into a museum in the town square of Moreland, Ga.

Caldwell died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He is interred in Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon. [1]

Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, 12 nonfiction collections, as well as 2 books for young readers.

• Bastard, short story (1929)
• Poor Fool, short story (1930)
• American Earth, short story (1931)
• Tobacco Road (1932)
• Tobacco Road adaptation by Jack Kirkland, based on the novel.
• We Are the Living, collection of short stories (1933)
• God's Little Acre (1933)
• Tenant Farmers, essay (1935)
• Some American People, essay (1935)
• Journeyman (1935)
• Kneel to the Rising Sun, short stories (1935)
• The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936)
• Saturday Afternoon, short story (1936)
• You Have Seen Their Faces (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1937)
• Southways, short story (1938)
• North of the Danube (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1939)
• Trouble in July (1940)
• Say Is This the USA (with Margaret Bourke-White, 1941)
• Moscow Under Fire, foreign correspondence (1942)
• Russia at War, foreign correspondence (1942)
• All-Out on the Road to Smolensk, foreign correspondence (1942)
• All Night Long (1942), A Novel of Guerilla Warfare in Russia (subtitle)
• Georgia Boy (1943)
• Tragic Ground (1944)
• A House in the Uplands (1946)
• The Sure Hand of God (1947)
• This Very Earth (1948)
• A Place Called Estherville (1949)

• A Swell Looking Girl
• The Humorous Side of Erskine Caldwell, edited by Robert Cantwell
• Episode in Palmetto (1950)
• Call It Experience, autobiography (1951)
• The Courting of Susie Brown, short stories (1952)
• A Lamp for Nightfall (1952)
• Love and Money (1954)
• The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell
• Gretta (1955)
• Gulf Coast Stories, short stories (1956)
• Certain Women, short stories (1957)
• Claudelle Inglish (1958)
• Molly Cottontail, children's book (1958)
• When You Think of Me, short stories (1959)
• Jenny by Nature (1961)
• Men and Women, short stories (1961)
• The Last Night of Summer (1963)
• In Search of Bisco, (travel writing, 1965)
• The Deer at Our House, children's book (1966)
• Writing in America, essay (1967)
• Miss Mama Aimee (1967)
• Deep South, (travel writing, 1968)
• Annette (1973)
• Afternoons in Mid America, essays (1976)
• With All My Might, (autobiography, 1987)
• Erskine Caldwell: Selected Letters, 1929-1955, edited by Robert L. McDonald (1999)