Erskine Caldwell? Stanley J. Kunitz? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: As a budding author I have often been told that I must hone my craft by reading numerous good books. Hence, I was astounded when I encountered the following statement from an acclaimed bestselling author:
All that I am I attribute to my dislike for reading books.
Apparently, this statement was made by U.S. novelist Erskine Caldwell who wrote “Tobacco Road” in 1932 and “God’s Little Acre” in 1933. Would you please help me to find a citation and to learn more about the context?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1933 U.S. poet Stanley J. Kunitz edited and published the reference work “Authors Today and Yesterday” which contained short profiles of 320 twentieth century authors. Kunitz requested autobiographical statements from hundreds of authors including Erskine Caldwell.
The reference was published by the H. W. Wilson Company of New York, which also published the “Wilson Bulletin for Librarians”. Caldwell’s profile appeared in both the bulletin1 and the reference book.2 Caldwell expressed his aversion to books, but he also revealed a love of magazines. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:
I have no literary preferences; and I do not know what “esthetic bias” means. In other words, the only explanation I wish to make is that all that I am I attribute to my dislike for reading books. I’ll read anything and everything in print that I can get my hands on if the medium is a magazine; but I dislike books as I do steel-traps. Now, at the present time, I force myself to read no less than two, occasionally three, novels a year—thinking that perhaps I ought to: whatever that signifies.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Other acclaimed authors have disliked novels. In 1933 “Authors Today and Yesterday” printed a profile of the pseudonymous English writer Olive Moore who was best known for the novels “Celestial Seraglio”, “Spleen”, and “Fugue”. Moore stated the following:3
I loathe books and never read them. Except informative books, giving me facts, any facts and all facts. I love travel best of all, and yet get very impatient with it. I like walking. I like talking. I like meeting people once. I love best knowing absolutely no one, but watching everyone.
In December 1933 “The Washington Post” printed the following:4
Erskine Caldwell hates books. As he says in “Authors Today and Yesterday,” a volume just published by H. W. Wilson Co., to which writing people have contributed pieces about their careers and tastes: “All that I am I attribute to my dislike for reading books. I’ll read anything and everything in print that I can get my hands on, if the medium is a magazine. But I dislike books as I dislike steel traps. …”
Also, in December 1933 “Newsweek” magazine mentioned the book “Authors Today and Yesterday” and reprinted the quotation:5
Erskine Caldwell, author of the best selling novel “God’s Little Acre”— “The only explanation I wish to make is that all that I am I attribute to my dislike for reading books.”
In 1935 “What Is a Book?: Thoughts about Writing” edited by Dale Warren contained a few pages of miscellaneous quotations including this item.6
ERSKINE CALDWELL
All I am I attribute to my dislike of reading books.
In 1965 the quotation continued to circulate in the periodical “Quote: The Weekly Digest”:7
All I am I attribute to my dislike of reading books.
—ERSKINE CALDWELL quoted in What Is a Book? edited by Dale Warren (Houghton, Mifflin).
In 1981 the quotation was reprinted in “Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell”:8
Caldwell once said of himself that “all I am, I attribute to my dislike of reading books. I’ll read anything in print I can put my hand on if the medium is a magazine, but I dislike books as I do a steel trap.”
In conclusion, Erskine Caldwell should receive credit for the remarks he wrote in an autobiographical essay which was published in the “Wilson Bulletin for Librarians” in 1933. Caldwell preferred reading magazines instead of books.
Image Notes: Picture of an open book from Olga Tutunaru at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous reading enthusiast whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1933 May, Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, Volume 7, Number 9, Erskine Caldwell: Autobiographical Sketch, Start Page 600, Quote Page 600, Column 2, The H. W. Wilson Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1934 (Copyright 1933), Authors Today and Yesterday, Edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, Second edition, Entry: Erskine Caldwell – Autobiographical sketch, Start Page 127, Quote Page 127 and 128, H. W. Wilson Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1934 (Copyright 1933), Authors Today and Yesterday, Edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, Second edition, Entry: Olive Moore – Autobiographical sketch, Start Page 481, Quote Page 481, H. W. Wilson Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1933 December 5, The Washington Post, Books, Quote Page 14, Column 1, Washington D.C. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1933 December 23, Newsweek, Volume 2, Number 21, Book: Case Histories: Self-Analyses by 320 Contemporary Authors, Quote Page 32, Column 1, Newsweek, Dayton, Ohio. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1935, What Is a Book?: Thoughts about Writing, Edited by Dale Warren, Quote Page 191, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1965 August 29, Quote: The Weekly Digest, Volume 50, Number 9, Section: Books – Reading, Quote Page 3, Column 2, Published by Droke House, Anderson, South Carolina. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1981, Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell, Edited by Scott MacDonald, “Seventeen Tales by Erskine Caldwell” by Arthur Ruhl, (Reprinted from Saturday Review of Literature, 12 (June 8, 1935), 5), Start Page 33, Quote Page 34, G. K. Hall & Company, Boston, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans) ↩︎