Books: Cheap South

KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN—Erskine Caldwell—Viking ($2.50).

The legendary character of the old South, all chivalresque, julepy and magnolious, is still stoutly upheld by such loyal romanticists as Stark Young and Julia Peterkin, but its present reputation has been considerably damaged by the nightmare realism of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Author Caldwell, particularly, has been almost wholly concerned with telling tales on a part of the South no Southerner ever boasts of—the poor white trash that clutters the South's backyards. Often he makes his tattered crackers the scarecrow-heroes of wildly ribald yarns,...