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) John Ford, and the storyline was considerably altered. The novel was included in "Life" magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. "Tobacco Road" is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta, Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as one of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his