As a comedy, Tobacco Road is a modest failure; as a tragedy, it’s an abject failure. And yet Erskine Caldwell’s novel, 80 years after its publication, remains a giddy, obscene joy. It as indelible as a freak show or car crash. Nobody knew what to make of Caldwell in 1932, and nobody much talks about him now, but his legacy persists. He is a progenitor of what could be called the degenerate school of American fiction. Descendents include writers like William S. Burroughs, Harry Crews, Katherine Dunn, and Barry Gifford. Tobacco Road is crass and deranged and irreducibly American.

The novel received censorious reviews upon publication, but after it was adapted into a play in 1935 and became the longest-running show in the history of Broadway, it went on to sell 10 million copies. It is not surprising that critics were made uneasy by the story of the Lesters (rhymes with festers, molesters, and incesters), a family of cruel, illiterate savages in west-central Georgia. In the early years of the Great Depression, the intellectual preoccupations of the ’20s were swiftly discarded. No longer did artists and critics gripe that America was a mechanized, standardized, puritanical country, governed by Babbitts, prudes, and dimwitted businessmen. As Frederick Lewis Allen writes in Since Yesterday, his history of America in the ’30s, the conversation had turned, with a thud, to economic reform. It was held that “the masses of the citizenry were the people who really mattered, the most fitting subjects for writer and artist, the people on whose behalf reform must be undertaken.” Writers needed to depict conditions as they were for the most unfortunate members of society—that was the only way to bring about social change. It was an innocent time in America, and writers still believed that fiction could bring about change.

The Lesters, at first glance, seem the ideal heroes of a Depression-era novel. They are poor; “dirt poor” is no exaggeration, for their land has been depleted by cotton farming and untilled for seven years. Seventy-five years earlier, grandfather Lester had owned a great tobacco plantation, but the property has long since been sold off to creditors. The Lesters only remain on their small parcel thanks to the pity of its new owner. Their house, which has never been painted, is sagging and rotted and porous. Sections of ceiling fall away every time it rains.

If only there were a Republican on the ticket who could combine the pro-business boosterism of Mitt Romney:

“What we need first, last, and all the time is a good, sound business administration!”

with the prideful anti-elitism of Rick Santorum:

Set with the challenge of humanizing his race for white readers, James Weldon Johnson realized that it was not enough to create a hero who was shrewd, intelligent, and valiant. His hero also had to be a conceited ass.

The anonymous narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man has never encountered a skill or trade that he cannot instantly master. As a 12-year-old he discovers, after several piano lessons, that he is not merely an “infant prodigy,” but “a true artist.” Later, thanks to this “natural talent,” he becomes “a remarkable player of rag-time,” “indeed…the best rag-time player in New York”—a distinction that would place him ahead of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. Language comes to him as easily as music. After spending a year at a cigar factory, he can speak Spanish “like a native”—“In fact, it was my pride that I spoke better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen.” In Paris, after “an astonishingly short time,” he acquires “a more than ordinary command of French”; a few months in Berlin and he’s fluent in German. The narrator enjoys flagrant successes in love (“I say, without any egotistic pride, that among my admirers were several of the best-looking women”) and money (“Concerning the position which I now hold I shall say nothing except that it pays extremely well”). There is nothing the man can’t do, in the post-Reconstruction South—except, of course, be seen on the street with a white woman, eat at a white restaurant, or be acknowledged in public by his white father.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is the first African-American novel written entirely in the first person, but Johnson did not have literary innovation in mind. He sincerely hoped that the book would pass as nonfiction. For this reason Johnson had to publish the book anonymously, since by 1912 he was already a hugely successful popular songwriter, Broadway celebrity, and the U.S. consul to Nicaragua. A cigar was named after him.

1902: Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon

Brewster’s Millions, a novel about a bet, was written on a bet. George Barr McCutcheon was visiting his publisher when the subject of bestselling novels came up in conversation.

“The name of the author is what sells the book,” remarked the publisher.

If history is written by the winners, who tells the story of the losers? Who sings of the strivers, con men, lechers, failed artists, degenerates, alcoholics, barbiturate poppers, neurotics, depressives, hustlers, cranky intellectuals, dissolute heirs, and whores? The novelist—that’s who. These losers are the heroes of most of the greatest novels of the 20th century. With apologies to Howard Zinn, the people’s history of the United States has been written by its novelists. And it’s a living document.

This monthly series will chronicle the history of the American century as seen through the eyes of its novelists. The goal is to create a literary anatomy of the last century—or, to be precise, from 1900 to 2012. In each column I’ll write about a single novel and the year it was published. The novel may not be the bestselling book of the year, the most praised, or the most highly awarded—though awards do have a way of fixing an age’s conventional wisdom in aspic. The idea is to choose a novel that, looking back from a safe distance, seems most accurately, and eloquently, to speak for the time in which it was written. Other than that there are few rules. I won’t pick any stinkers.

The whole project will be extremely subjective and idiosyncratic, like all reading of fiction. Some of the novels will have been, at the time of publication, the most-discussed book of the year (Catch-22, Valley of the Dolls, The Bonfire of the Vanities come to mind); in other cases I’ll choose novels that were ignored initially, but discovered later (The Great Gatsby, say, or The Day of the Locust, which sold 22 copies in Nathanael West’s lifetime). There will also be books neglected both at their birth and today, but deserving of attention. The hope each month will be to find a novel that defines the age in which it was written with an intimacy and nuance unmatched by any history book, newspaper article, or film.