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By Erskine Caldwell. New York: The Viking Press, 1933. 303 p.
About half a year ago we saw the spectacle of a Federal court defending the honor and virtue of a book which had been attacked as obscene. The book, God's Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell, is a vivid story of poor Southern whites, groping for inner peace. Because here and there this struggle was colored by "perverted" trends this book drew upon itself much curiosity and indignation. The novel is interesting to the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who must view it as an arresting, if confused, product of the human spirit, challenging him to try to understand the psychic sources of the confusion and to estimate the influence it may exert upon readers.
Of course the book is only an isolated fragment in the stream of the author's life, and to pretend to understand the whole through the interpretation of any single fragment is to claim an omniscience which we fortunately do not possess. Nevertheless, the book is the product of the author's thoughts and feelings, and we are justified in wondering about his relationship to the yearnings and behavior of the confused and sickly crew with which he has peopled his tale. It would hardly make a fundamental difference whether the author