Original Title "American Earth" Human drama—Southern style Erskine Caldwell is famous around the world as America's master of rural ribaldry, but he is more than that. He stands alone in his loving understanding of the petty passions and little lecheries that make human beings the sly and comical dogs that they are, of the trivial things that make people alive and real—what a girl shows when she bends over to pick strawberries, the way a bee sting turns young strangers into lovers, how two daughters battle over Father's body, the pride a hayseed husband takes in his bride's store-bought underwear. The drolleries of crossroads gossip are Caldwell's stock-in-trade, and while the pettinesses and passions he deals in have a genuine corn pone flavor, they ring true for readers from Caldwell's native Georgia to the ends of our story-loving earth.