SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Winesburg, Ohio

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe

THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE

HANDS, concerning Wing Biddlebaum

PAPER PILLS, concerning Doctor Reefy

MOTHER, concerning Elizabeth Willard

THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival

NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion

GODLINESS, a Tale in Four Parts
       I, concerning Jesse Bentley
       II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
       III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley
       IV Terror, concerning David Hardy

A MAN OF IDEAS, concerning Joe Welling

ADVENTURE, concerning Alice Hindman

RESPECTABILITY, concerning Wash Williams

THE THINKER, concerning Seth Richmond

TANDY, concerning Tandy Hard

THE STRENGTH OF GOD, concerning the
       Reverend Curtis Hartman

THE TEACHER, concerning Kate Swift

LONELINESS, concerning Enoch Robinson

AN AWAKENING, concerning Belle Carpenter

"QUEER," concerning Elmer Cowley

THE UNTOLD LIE, concerning Ray Pearson

DRINK, concerning Tom Foster

DEATH, concerning Doctor Reefy
       and Elizabeth Willard

SOPHISTICATION, concerning Helen White

DEPARTURE, concerning George Willard

INTRODUCTION

by Irving Howe

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen
years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio.
Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood
Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he
was opening for me new depths of experience,
touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in
my young life had prepared me for.  A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent
time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across
America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes
of wasted life, wasted love--was this the "real"
America?--that Anderson sketched in Winesburg.  In
those days only one other book seemed to offer so
powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.

Several years later, as I was about to go overseas
as a soldier, I spent my last weekend pass on a
somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town
upon which Winesburg was partly modeled.  Clyde
looked, I suppose, not very different from most
other American towns, and the few of its residents
I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed
quite uninterested.  This indifference would not have
surprised him; it certainly should not surprise any-
one who reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write liter-
ary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biog-
raphy of Anderson.  It came shortly after Lionel
Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an at-
tack from which Anderson's reputation would never
quite recover.  Trilling charged Anderson with in-
dulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague
emotional meandering in stories that lacked social
or spiritual solidity.  There was a certain cogency in
Trilling's attack, at least with regard to Anderson's
inferior work, most of which he wrote after Wines-
burg, Ohio.  In my book I tried, somewhat awk-
wardly, to bring together the kinds of judgment
Trilling had made with my still keen affection for
the best of Anderson's writings.  By then, I had read
writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished
than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm
place in my memories, and the book I wrote might
be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light--a glow
of darkness, you might say--that he had brought to me.

Decades passed.  I no longer read Anderson, per-
haps fearing I might have to surrender an admira-
tion of youth. (There are some writers one should
never return to.) But now, in the fullness of age,
when asked to say a few introductory words about
Anderson and his work, I have again fallen under
the spell of Winesburg, Ohio, again responded to the
half-spoken desires, the flickers of longing that spot
its pages.  Naturally, I now have some changes of
response: a few of the stories no longer haunt me
as once they did, but the long story "Godliness,"
which years ago I considered a failure, I now see
as a quaintly effective account of the way religious
fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can become
intertwined in American experience.

Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876.
His childhood and youth in Clyde, a town with per-
haps three thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of
poverty, but he also knew some of the pleasures
of pre-industrial American society.  The country was
then experiencing what he would later call "a sud-
den and almost universal turning of men from the
old handicrafts towards our modern life of ma-
chines." There were still people in Clyde who re-
membered the frontier, and like America itself, the
town lived by a mixture of diluted Calvinism and a
strong belief in "progress," Young Sherwood, known
as "Jobby"--the boy always ready to work--showed
the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde re-
spected: folks expected him to become a "go-getter,"
And for a time he did.  Moving to Chicago in his
early twenties, he worked in an advertising agency
where he proved adept at turning out copy.  "I create
nothing, I boost, I boost," he said about himself,
even as, on the side, he was trying to write short stories.

In 1904 Anderson married and three years later
moved to Elyria, a town forty miles west of Cleve-
land, where he established a firm that sold paint.  "I
was going to be a rich man.... Next year a bigger
house; and after that, presumably, a country estate."
Later he would say about his years in Elyria, "I was
a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one."
Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those
shapeless hungers--a need for self-expression? a
wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?--
that would become a recurrent motif in his fiction.

And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning
point in Anderson's life.  Plainly put, he suffered a
nervous breakdown, though in his memoirs he
would elevate this into a moment of liberation in
which he abandoned the sterility of commerce and
turned to the rewards of literature.  Nor was this, I
believe, merely a deception on Anderson's part,
since the breakdown painful as it surely was, did
help precipitate a basic change in his life.  At the
age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to
Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and
cultural bohemians in the group that has since come
to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson
soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit,
and like many writers of the time, he presented him-
self as a sardonic critic of American provincialism
and materialism.  It was in the freedom of the city,
in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life,
that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts
with--but also to release his affection for--the world
of small-town America.  The dream of an uncondi-
tional personal freedom, that hazy American version
of utopia, would remain central throughout Anderson's
life and work.  It was an inspiration; it was a delusion.

In 1916 and 1917 Anderson published two novels
mostly written in Elyria, Windy McPherson's Son and
Marching Men, both by now largely forgotten.  They
show patches of talent but also a crudity of thought
and unsteadiness of language.  No one reading these
novels was likely to suppose that its author could
soon produce anything as remarkable as Winesburg,
Ohio.  Occasionally there occurs in a writer's career
a sudden, almost mysterious leap of talent, beyond
explanation,   perhaps beyond any need for explanation.

In 1915-16 Anderson had begun to write and in
1919 he published the stories that comprise Wines-
burg, Ohio, stories that form, in sum, a sort of loosely-
strung episodic novel.  The book was an immediate
critical success, and soon Anderson was being