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Canoerebel -> RE: The Gorn Supremacy; stock AW1Steve v. geofflambert (1/15/2017 1:01:19 AM)
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This great unwashed heathen from the South knows that Moby-Dick is hyphenated.
The experts sing the acclaim of Tobacco Road too. Highly educated folks and northerners, in particular, appreciated it's depictions of poor, uneducated southerners. The author (Erskine Caldwell, a Georgian) wrote in 1972 that it was an accurate representation of the sharecropper class.
It wasn't, but there's no convincing the washed elite of that fact. From the work I've done, I know that sharecroppers, generally, were decent, hard-working, God-fearing folks. To check that perception, years ago I spoke with Harry Roper, the son of Arthur Raper (Harry changed his last name as an adult). Arthur was a sociologist who lived with, studied, and wrote about the sharecropper class in east Georgia in the 1930s and '40s. Harry grew up there but spent the rest of his life in Maine, detesting southerners partly because of the racism. But Harry told me that Caldwell's depiction of sharecroppers was a weird and demented reflection on reality. He told me that most sharecroppers had two iconic items in their houses - a Bible and a photo of FDR. He knew them as the decent, hardworking folk that are absent from Caldwell's odd and phantasmorgic portrayal.
Appreciation of a book - literature included - is highly subjective. My lack of appreciation for Tobacco Road, though, isn't due to ignorance. Similarly, I'll stick by my dislike of Moby-Dick, no matter what layers Melville used and his ultimate reasons for writing the book.
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