Tobacco Road is a novel by acclaimed writer Erskine Caldwell. Tobacco Road is the story of one family's inability to move on when life does not go as planned. Jeeter Lester has always worked the land on which his grandfather once farmed tobacco; however, debts have turned Jeeter into a sharecropper on land that the owner no longer wants to farm. Jeeter vows every year that he will find a way to buy the seed and fertilizer needed to farm the land, but every year he finds excuses not to do the work until too much time passes and planting would be futile. Tobacco Road is a story of futility, of giving up, a story that will either inspire the reader to work that much harder or continue to give up in the face of adversity.

The tobacco road that passes by the rural Georgia home of Jeeter Lester and his family, in Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road, may speak to the prosperous colonial history of tobacco farming. But by the early-20th-century setting of this novel, the tobacco market has long since gone bust, and the cotton market seems likely to follow. And impoverished small farmers like Jeeter Lester, sharecroppers who are trying to make a living through tenant farming, are trapped in a system where they are bound to lose – even if they don’t know that they’re trapped.

Jeeter finds that he’s once again lived through the season for beginning spring planting without beginning to plant anything, and reflects sadly upon his lot: “He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life” (p. 228). And one last attempt on his part to go through the motions of preparing the ground for spring planting results in one final tragedy for the Lester family.

Caldwell's mother, a former teacher, tutored her son at home. [3] Caldwell was 14 when he first attended a school. [3] Biography". John Wade. Archived from the original on September 29, 2011 . Retrieved September 29, 2011. a b Trueheart, Charles (March 1, 1987). "Erskine Caldwell The Final Chapter". Washington Post . Retrieved October 1, 2022.

It takes a few hours to spend with a family like the Lesters, reading their story. It takes a lifetime to appreciate the message behind it. I have seen Tobacco Road labeled as satire -- and I wondered given the degree of realism present. But then I think of Granny behind the chinaberry trees, Pearl with the almost unnaturally beautiful blond hair, Bessie the lustful preacher woman with "the face" no one can abide, and lastly the car -- the object that both embodies so much emotion and is the "vehicle" for so much pain and evil.