Tobacco Road (novel) poor Southern farmers such as the Lesters are trapped, continues. Tobacco Road (novel) Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell about Georgia sharecroppers. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933, and ran for eight years, an astounding feat for a non-musical and, as of 2014, it was still the 18th longest-running Broadway show in history as well as being the second-longest running non-musical ever on Broadway. The novel ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, as the author's father, Ira Caldwell, had argued in his 1930 article in "The Eugenics Review". A 1941
Tobacco Road (novel) any of the other farmers because it was too risky and there were too many asking for it. Jeeter sets a fire to burn off broom sedge and hopes somehow to find enough credit to farm his land that spring. As Jeeter and Ada sleep, sparks from the fire ignite the shingles of their house, which burns to the ground, killing them in their sleep. As the novel closes, Dude makes his first mention of working: He voices the same thoughts of plowing the Lester land that Jeeter had expressed throughout the story, indicating that the vicious cycle in which