Wild flowers erskine caldwell analysis essays

Unable to bear the heat and the weeds and the noise of the chain any longer, he herds Fiddler into a gully and brutally kills him with his shotgun and ax. The violence done, Jesse sharpens his hoe and returns to the fields, optimistic that he can save his crop.

For this reason, Caldwell’s work was frequently banned in the 1930’s as pornographic and for appearing to promote gratuitous violence. “Saturday Afternoon”. “Saturday Afternoon,” for example, is the story of an offhand killing, by a mob of whites, of a black man named Will Maxie for supposedly talking to a white girl.

Erskine Caldwell’s reputation as a short-story writer rests mainly on the collections published in the 1930’s: American Earth, We Are the Living, Kneel to the Rising Sun, and Other Stories, and Southways. Most of these stories reflect a social protest against the racial and economic oppression in the South during the Great Depression.