Sure Hand of God was published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1947, and it is one of Caldwell’s later novels — less powerful than his 1930s work but still engaged with the themes of poverty, sexuality, and religious hypocrisy that defined his career.
Molly Bowser is a boardinghouse keeper in a small Southern town who uses her beauty and sexual skill to manipulate the men around her, extracting money, labor, and devotion with a calculated efficiency that the narrative treats as both admirable and horrifying. Into her orbit comes a drifter — a man with no money and few prospects — who becomes one of her victims. The counterpoint is provided by a genuinely religious woman whose faith is real and whose decency is ineffective against the predatory world Molly inhabits.
The “sure hand of God” of the title is ironic: God’s hand, if it exists in Caldwell’s fictional world, operates through the mechanisms of sexual desire and economic need, guiding people toward disaster with the same inevitability that drives them toward food and shelter. The novel extends Caldwell’s lifelong argument that in a society organized around exploitation, the exploiters are merely responding rationally to the incentives the system provides.
Collecting Sure Hand of God
First edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1947): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10