God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

"I set aside an acre of my farm for God twenty-seven years ago, when I bought this place, and every year I give the church all that comes off that acre of ground."
--Ty Ty Warden in God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell (Viking,1933)

The problem is that Ty Ty's farm has not made any money in the last fifteen years, as Ty Ty and his sons Buck and Shaw have filled the farm with holes, digging for gold. Caldwell's proletarian novel was published originally in 1933 and successfully repelled attempts to prosecute or ban it, based on alleged obscenity.  There indeed is plenty of rutting going on, including by Ty Ty's unmarried daughter Darling Jill, his daughter Rosamond (married to "lint-head" Will Thompson, whose cotton mill is closed because of a lockout), Buck's wife Griselda, and Ty Ty's son Jim Leslie.  Other characters include aspiring sheriff Pluto Swint and albino Dave, kidnapped by Ty Ty and his sons to help find the elusive gold.

The book goes from crude comedy to dark tragedy, as Will Thomson is killed by strikebreakers and Buck kills Jim Leslie for lusting after Griselda and, apparently, kills himself. "Maybe God made two kinds of us, after all.  It looks like now, though I never used to think so, that God made a man to work the ground and a man to work the machinery,"  says Ty Ty.  The book takes place in Georgia and South Caroline and by using farce and sex (nothing explicit, quite tame by today's standards) Caldwell effectively captures the difficulties of whites in the South in the thirties, finding pleasure where they can and unable to make a living at either farming or manufacturing (the only two African-Americans in the book are Uncle Felix and Black Sam, who work for Ty Ty and are always hustling to find enough to eat).