God's Little Acre

God's Little Acre is a novel by the American writer Erskine Caldwell, published in 1933. It is set in rural Georgia during the Great Depression.

Ty Ty Walden is a farmer who is convinced that there is gold on his land, and he spends his time and his sons' labour turning the property over rather than working it. He has also promised a small part of the farm to the church, an acre he calls God's little acre, and he keeps shifting its boundaries because he is afraid of what the digging might turn up if he went into it.

Around him are his wife and his daughters Rosamund and Darling Jill, his son Buck with Buck's wife Griselda, and his unmarried son Shaw, and the novel is made of the poverty, the jealousy and the sexual tension that run through all of them. The book's sexual themes were controversial enough that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice asked a New York court to censor it, and it later became an Armed Services Edition during the Second World War.