One night last December, Tobacco Road, written by Erskine Caldwell and dramatized by Jack Kirkland, opened on Broadway (TIME, Dec. 18). Manhattan critics took the play and its scenes of Georgia low-life at face value, spluttered such epithets at its characterizations as "livestock," "pigs," "guinea pigs," "weird savages," "the primitive human animal in the throes of gender," "foul and degenerate parcel of folks," "the hangdog and hookworm set." Editorially the Daily News compared the play to the more brutal writings of Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser, figured that the Deep South must be the...
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