God’s Little Acre was published by Viking Press in 1933, and it surpassed Tobacco Road in both sales and scandal. Ty Ty Walden is a Georgia farmer who has been digging for gold on his land for fifteen years, tearing up his fields with the monomaniacal conviction that treasure lies just beneath the surface. He has reserved one acre of his property for God — the income from which goes to the church — but he moves the acre’s location whenever his digging approaches it, so that God’s little acre is always somewhere he isn’t looking.
The gold-digging is the novel’s central metaphor: Ty Ty is looking for treasure in the wrong place, destroying productive land in pursuit of a fantasy. His children, meanwhile, pursue their own fantasies with equal destructiveness. Will Thompson, married to Ty Ty’s daughter Rosamond, is a mill worker who dreams of organizing the textile workers at the shuttered Scottsville mill; his passion for labor activism is matched by his sexual passion for Griselda, Ty Ty’s beautiful daughter-in-law, whose body exerts an almost gravitational pull on every man who encounters her.
The novel’s sexual frankness — which is considerable for 1933, with detailed descriptions of physical desire and several scenes of intercourse — led to its prosecution for obscenity in New York. The case was heard by Magistrate Benjamin Greenspan, who ruled that the book was not obscene because its frank passages served a literary purpose. The ruling was an important precedent in American censorship law, and the publicity from the trial boosted sales enormously. By the time of Caldwell’s death in 1987, God’s Little Acre had sold over fourteen million copies.
Collecting God’s Little Acre
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1933): Orange cloth, dust jacket. The first printing states “First Published in February 1933” on the copyright page.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $800–$3,000
- Without jacket: $50–$150
- Signet paperback first printing: $10–$25