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Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio in 1876. His childhood and youth were spent in in Clyde, Ohio, population about 3,000, 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 sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines.” There were still people in Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America itself, the town lived by a mixture of diluted Calvinism and a strong belief in “progress,” In 1915-16 Anderson had begun to write and in 1919 he published the stories that comprise Winesburg, 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 ranked as a significant literary figure. The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs in Winesburg, Ohio is a stylized version of the American language, sometimes rising to formal rhetorical patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But at its best, Anderson’s prose style is a supple instrument, yielding that “low fine music” which he admired so much in the stories of Turgenev. In an introduction to a later publication of the book, Irving Howe wrote: “Anderson’s influence upon later American writers, especially those who wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson’s “was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity … to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.” And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of his voice.” Chapter 1- The Book of the Grotesque [audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.greatbooksaudio.com/audio/winesburg1.mp3]

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