Deep South: Memory and Observation was published by Weybright and Talley in 1968, and it is Caldwell’s return to the nonfiction territory he had explored so effectively in You Have Seen Their Faces. The book combines memoir — Caldwell’s recollections of growing up in the South, of the experiences that shaped his fiction, of the people and places he had known — with contemporary observation of the South during the civil rights era.
The memoir sections are valuable for what they reveal about the origins of Caldwell’s fiction. He describes the poor whites and Black sharecroppers he encountered as a boy traveling with his itinerant minister father through Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee — the originals of the Lesters and the Waldens and the Douthits. He is candid about the limitations of his childhood perspective and about the ways in which his fiction simplified and distorted the lives it depicted.
The contemporary sections assess the changes wrought by the civil rights movement: desegregation, voter registration, the transformation of Southern politics. Caldwell is cautiously optimistic — he sees genuine progress in legal rights — but skeptical about deeper change: the economic structures that had created the poverty he wrote about were still intact, and the new legal equality had not yet translated into economic equality.
Collecting Deep South
First edition (Weybright and Talley, New York, 1968): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10