American Writer (Erskine Caldwell) born on this date (1903) - work was banned in Boston

From Writer's Almanac (American Public Media: Garrison Keillor):

December 17 is the birthday of writer Erskine Caldwell, born in Moreland, Georgia (1903). His father was an itinerant Presbyterian preacher, and Caldwell lived in a series of poor rural communities in the South. He said: "I could not become accustomed to the sight of children's stomachs bloated from hunger and seeing the ill and aged too weak to walk to the fields to search for something to eat. In the evenings I wrote about what I had seen during the day, but nothing I put down on paper succeeded in conveying the full meaning of poverty and hopelessness and degradation as I had observed it."

Caldwell published his two most famous books back to back: Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). Both were stories of destitute Southern workers -- Tobacco Road was about sharecroppers, God's Little Acre about mill workers. Both books were sexually explicit and full of profanity, and were widely condemned and banned across the South. Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, criticized Caldwell (and William Faulkner) for selling a vision of the South that Northerners wanted to read. God's Little Acre was banned in Boston, and the Georgia Literary Commission recommended that anyone caught reading it be sent to jail, but it became one of the best-selling books of the 20th century. Caldwell's books have sold more than 80 million copies.
His other books include We are the Living (1933); You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), with his second wife, Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White; A Place Called Estherville (1949), and With All My Might (1987).