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" target="_blank" title="n.批评；评论(文)">criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical" target="_blank" title="a.批评的；关键性的">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 effectiveaccount 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?--