Moreland: Two Writers, One Small Town

The little Coweta County town of Moreland, population under four hundred, has produced two of the most widely read writers the South ever turned out.

Erskine Caldwell was born nearby in Coweta County in nineteen oh three, the son of a traveling minister. His novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, raw portraits of dirt-poor Southern sharecroppers, became two of the best-selling American novels of the twentieth century. The Broadway adaptation of Tobacco Road ran for seven consecutive years, a record at the time. His birthplace, a small clapboard house called The Little Manse, sits today on the town square as a museum.

A generation later, Lewis Grizzard grew up on these same streets. He became the South's most beloved newspaper humorist, syndicated in four hundred fifty papers across the country, a man who turned Southern small-town life into comedy and affection. Two writers, one tiny town, both of them impossible to explain without this place.