Erskine Preston Caldwell was born December 17, 1903 in the small town of White Oak, Georgia, the only child of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. The family moved a lot and Caldwell was mostly home tutored. After some college, he went to work for the Atlanta Journal, then moved to Maine, where he began his fiction career writing about poverty, racism and social issues. Caldwell two most popular novels—Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre—were published in the early 1930s. Through several marriages, he moved around the country and traveled the world, writing about his travels while continuing to produce a great many short stories and novels. Caldwell died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987, in Paradise Valley, Arizona.