Sherwood Anderson 1876 1941 Sherwood Anderson Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson 1876 -1941

Sherwood Anderson • Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) • American writer, mainly of short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio. • Great influence on American fiction was profound, in Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck

Sherwood Anderson • Life • Works • Winesburg, Ohio

Life (Major Works included) • The third of seven children, born in Camden, Ohio in 1876 • Left school at 14 and after various jobs served in the Spanish-American War (1898 -99). • After leaving the US Army, Anderson worked as a manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. • 1908 began writing short stories and novels. • Friends with other writers in Chicago such as Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg.

Life • Radical political views and in 1914 • Work published in The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, including the stories about small-town life that were subsequently published as Winesburg, Ohio. • First novel, Windy Mc. Pherson's Son published in 1916 • Marching Men (1917) • Collection of prose poems, American Chants (1918).

Life • Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson's most important work, a collection of 23 inter-related stories of small-town life, features George Willard, a reporter for the local newspaper, who has ambitions to become a famous writer. • Other books published during this period: – – – Poor White (1920), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Many Marriages (1923) Horses and Men (1923). Most commercial successful novel was Dark Laughter (1925).

Life • Autobiography, A Story Teller's Story, was published in 1924, failed to recapture the standard of the work produced in Winesburg, Ohio. • Later work such as Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), Beyond Desire (1932) and Death in the Woods (1933) failed to make an impact on critics or the bookbuying public. • Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis in Panama on 8 th March, 1941.

Works • • • • Windy Mc. Pherson's Son, (1916, novel) Marching Men, (1917, novel) Winesburg, Ohio, (1919, novel) Poor White, (1920, novel) Triumph of the Egg, (1921, short stories) Many Marriages, (1923, novel) Horses and Men, (1923, short stories) A Story-Teller's Story, (1924, semi-autobiographical novel) Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, (1924, memoirs) An Exibition of Paintings By Alfred H. Maurer, (1924, non-fiction) Dark Laughter, (1925, novel) A Meeting South, (1925, novel) Modern Writer, (1925, non-fiction)

Works • Tar: A Midwest Childhood, (1926, semi-autobiographical novel) • Sherwood Anderson's Notebook, (1926, memoirs) • Hello Towns, (1929, short stories) • Alice: The Lost Novel, (1929, novel) • Onto Being Published, (1930, non-fiction) • Beyond Desire, (1932, novel) • Death in the Woods, (1933, essays) • Puzzled America, (1935, essays) • Kit Brandon, (1936, novel) • Dreiser: A Biography, (1936, non-fiction) • Winesburg and Others, (1937, play) • Home Town, (1940, novel)

Works San Francisco at Christmas, (1940, memoirs) Lives of Animals, (1966, novel) Return to Winesburg, Ohio, (1967, essays) The Memoirs of Sherwood Anderson, (1968, memoirs) No Swank, (1970, novel) Perhaps Women, (1970, novel) The Buck Fever Papers, (1971, essays) Ten Short Plays, (1972, plays) Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, (1972, essays) • Nearer the Grass Roots, (1976, novel) • • •

Works The Writer at His Craft, (1978, non-fiction) Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the Arts, (1978, nonfiction) The Teller's Tale, (1982, novel) Selected Letters: 1916 – 1933, (1984, letters) Writer's Diary: 1936 - 1941, (1987, memoir) Early Writings of Sherwood Anderson, (1989, short stories) Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, (1990, letters) • The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, (1995, short stories) • Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings By Sherwood Anderson, (1998, short stories) • •

Anderson’s style • “grotesque” or “twisted” characters – Odd behaviors – Entrapped in problematic situations • Co-presence of – the abnormal and the normal – Twistedness and sweetness – Ugly and beauty

Winesburg, Ohio • Short Summary • Characters • Major themes

Short Summary • Begins with a sort of prologue, in which an old writer imagines all the people he has known as "grotesques, " warped in their pursuits of various truths. • A series of stories ensues, each concerned with a single resident of Winesburg.

– "Hands, " describes Wing Biddlebaum, a recluse with remarkable hands that he cannot control, who has fled from false accusations of molesting a boy in another town. – "Paper Pills, " is about Doctor Reefy, an aging medical man who marries one of his young patients, only to have her die six months later. – "Mother, " we meet Elizabeth Willard, the mother of the book's central character, George Willard, who is a young reporter for the local paper. Elizabeth is a sick woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage, and she imagines herself locked in a struggle with her husband for influence over George.

Short Summary • "The Philosopher, " the eccentric Doctor Parcival imagines that a lynch mob is after him, and tells George Willard the secret of life: "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. " • "Nobody Knows, " George goes out into the fields and sleeps with a girl named Louise Trunnion, only to feel guilty about it afterward. • The next four stories, under the heading "Godliness, " depict Jesse Bentley, a wealthy farmer who imagines himself a Biblical figure chosen by God. – His daughter, Louise Bentley, receives no love from him, and stumbles into a loveless marriage. – Her son, David Hardy, is sent to live with his grandfather on the old man's farm, and Jesse takes the boy out into the forest in search of a message from God. He finds no message, however, and succeeds only in traumatizing the boy so much that David runs away from Winesburg forever.

Short Summary • "A Man of Ideas, " a talkative man named Joe Welling successfully courts a woman whose father and brother are notorious thugs. • "Adventure, " depicts the loneliness of Alice Hindman, an unmarried woman whose true love (as she considers him) left Winesburg years ago and has never returned. • "Respectability" portrays Wash Williams, the filthy, ugly telegraph operator in Winesburg who despises women because of his wife's infidelity and his mother-in-law's treachery. • "The Thinker, " tells the story of a brooding young man named Seth Richmond who feels that he does not belong in Winesburg. At the end of a long evening with Helen White, the daughter of the Winesburg banker, he tells her that he plans to leave town for good.

Short Summary • "Tandy" tells the story of a little girl named Tandy Hard whose first name comes from a drunken man's description of the perfect woman. • "The Strength of God, " a minister named Curtis Hartman is tempted into lust by the sight of Kate Swift, a local schoolteacher. His temptation passes when he sees her, one snowy night, praying naked. • "The Teacher" takes place on the same night, and depicts Kate Smith's attraction to George Willard--her simultaneous desires to teach and embrace him--and her sudden guilty flight from his office, which leaves him confused. • "Loneliness" details Enoch Robinson's move from Winesburg to New York, where he populates his apartment with imaginary friends, only to have them move out when he tries to tell his female neighbor about them.

Short Summary • "An Awakening, " George Willard goes out walking one night and has what he thinks is an epiphany. He tries to tell Belle Carpenter, the girl he has been seeing, about it, but another one of her suitors beats him up, and the magic of the evening slips away. • "Queer" depicts the resentment that Elmer Cowley, the son of a store owner, feels toward Winesburg and George Willard because he thinks that the town considers his family to be odd. The story ends with Elmer beating up George and hopping a train out of town. • "The Untold Lie, " a farmhand named Hal Winters asks another farmhand named Ray Pearson for advice about whether to get married, causing Ray to reflect on his marriage, which he does with disgust. • "Drink" portrays a genial, happy young man named Tom Foster and his first experience with drunkenness.

Short Summary • "Death, " Elizabeth Willard and Doctor Reefy spend time together and begin to fall in love, as she slips toward death. She dies, finally, and George decides to quit Winesburg forever. • "Sophistication, " he and Helen White go out walking together on the night of the county fair, and run around like children as evening falls on Winesburg. Both are moving on from their small town, as Helen is going to college. • "Departure, " George Willard boards a train and leaves Winesburg for good, letting his life there "become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. "

Characters • • George Willard Wing Biddlebaum Doctor Reefy Elizabeth Willard

George Willard • A young man who works as a reporter in Winesburg, Ohio. Despite the fact that he is one of the least developed of the major characters, he occupies the central role in the book. As a result of either chance meetings or other people's decisions to confide in him, George is the figure who links many of the novel's disparate stories together.

Wing Biddlebaum • A sensitive ex-schoolteacher who was accused of molesting one of his male pupils in a town near Winesburg. His hands are amazingly dexterous, but he has difficulty controlling them, and they tend to wander where they don't belong.

Doctor Reefy • An aging doctor with a declining practice. He marries a young female patient, but she dies after less than a year. He also develops a close relationship with Elizabeth Willard during her last months.

Elizabeth Willard • George Willard's mother, and Tom Willard's wife. She lives in the family's run-down boarding house, where she is constantly ill and has become an invalid. She displays desperate impotence in her dealings with other people, including her husband son.

Major Themes • • • Life in death The pastoral Failure of absolute truth Rebellion against values dominating American culture Winesburg as a microcosm of the universal

Life in death • Most of the figures share the similar history of a failed passion in life, of some kind or another. Many are lonely introverts who struggle with a burning fire which still smolders inside of them. The moments described by the short stories are usually the moments when the passion tries to resurface but no longer has the strength. The stories are brief glimpses of people failing.

The pastoral • The narrator often employs a theme of mock sentimentality toward the old, colloquial farmland that Winesburg represents as small town. More largely, it provides a background for examining the break down of the archetypal patterns of human existence: sacrifice, initiation, and rebirth.

Failure of absolute truth • Anderson believed that one should keep separate the worlds of realism and fantasy. He did not believe that an author could not write about both or about the collision of these worlds but he feared that authors would become stuck on realism or naturalism and forget about the importance of dreams, idealism, surrealism, and fantasy. Each of his figures grasped at least one truth as absolute and made it their mantra. The decision to base all of one's existence on an absolute truth transformed the figure into a grotesque and the truth into a lie.

Rebellion against values dominating American culture • The degeneration of communal bonds between people - sexual, familial, friendship, ritual modes of religion - was a common theme first traced by Anderson and then by many of the next generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot). It originated after World War I because of a disillusionment toward a modern society which was materialistic and business/industry oriented. The senses of modern men were anesthetized and they lacked personal identity. The isolated human of modernity was unfit for the love of men or community.

Winesburg as a microcosm of the universal • The figures of Winesburg were forced to handle issues and events which people universally underwent. Many common threads between man and between the self in relation to the world exist which the grotesque figures deal with in a manner to which any reader could relate. Winesburg then becomes Any Town, USA and the characters symbolize flaws and struggles in the universal human experience. Winesburg functions synecdochally for the typical human community.

Question 1 • Where did the story happen? • Near The town of Bidwell, Ohio

Question 2 • Does the story mention any information that indicate when the story took place? • Father (34 -45) • 1840 s-1850 s? • America: pre-automobile

Question 3 • At the beginning of the story, what kind of job did the narrator’s father do? Did he enjoy it?

Question 4 • What made father gave up his work as a farmhand started his own enterprises?

Question 5 • What enterprises did father do to get up in this world? Did he make any success?

Question 6 • Did the narrator mention any grotesque behaviors of his father in the story?

Question 7 • What’s the narrating perspective of this story? Is it different from that of the stories we have read before?

Question 8 • What’s the language style of this story? Is it easy to be understood?

Difficult Questions to be discussed

Question 1 • Why did the narrator’s father treasure up the dead deformed chickens?

Question 2 • How do we understand the grotesque behavior of the narrator’s father to entertain his customers in the restaurant?

Question 3 • Are there any changes of father’s temperament in his struggling to “get up in this world”?

The story • • Centers on the narrator’s father a man “intended by nature to be. . . cheerful [and] kindly” Through acquiring the “American passion for getting up in the world” Loses his happiness

Question 4 • How does the narrator’s family experience influence his outlook on life?

“The Egg” • childhood memory has profoundly shaped the narrator’s moral outlook • Pessimistic • father’s loss engenders in the son – a sense of tragedy and irresolution – a conviction that “the egg”—the source and symbol of that loss—completely and utterly triumphs over life

Question 5 • What does the egg come to symbolize by the end of the narrative? What ideas (themes) do you think the author want to convey by this story?