Georgia Boy was published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1943, and it is Caldwell’s most genial book — a collection of linked stories narrated by William Stroup, a twelve-year-old boy whose father, Morris Stroup, is a lazy, conniving, endlessly inventive rascal. The stories follow Morris through a series of schemes — each more improbable than the last — designed to get money, avoid work, and stay one step ahead of his formidable wife, Martha.
The book’s charm lies in the gap between William’s innocent narration and the adult realities he describes but does not understand. Morris Stroup’s adventures involve petty theft, confidence tricks, explosive domestic arguments, and encounters with the law, all presented through the eyes of a boy who admires his father’s audacity without comprehending its moral implications. The device is Twain’s — the child narrator who reveals more than he knows — and Caldwell uses it with surprising delicacy.
The Georgia of Georgia Boy is recognizably the same poor, rural, racially stratified world of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, but the tone is entirely different: warm where the earlier novels were bleak, comic where they were grotesque. Handsome Brown, the family’s Black hired hand, is treated with an affection and respect unusual in Caldwell’s fiction, and the racial dynamics, though still unequal, are rendered with more complexity than in the earlier novels.
Collecting Georgia Boy
First edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1943): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20