Sherwood Anderson

“ As I sat in the movie house it was evident that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children sitting about and I also want to be loved—to be a little dreaded and feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”
* * * * *
As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as [Pg 121] that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such notion must have still been in my mind. ”

“ Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. “Art Sherman would be there,” thought Sam, materialising the picture he saw; “nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon.”
Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit, his mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman. More than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. ”

“ I don’t want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and covered with mud. As for these women—away with them—I’ll face them down—I did it once before and I’ll do it again. Go to your city and make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman’s fight.”
“It is horrible. You don’t understand,” Sam protested.
A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood’s face.
“I understand,” she said. “I have been on that battlefield. It is to be won only by silence and tireless waiting. ”

“ The workingman who walked beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk unobserved with him, because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was safe with him. In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light with his wife and his mother-inlaw. ”

“ Sherwood Anderson of manic-depressive temperament is an artist who is a blend of many characteristics, the predominant one of which is a love of beauty, particularly of form. All of them are inherited. Had he been able, or enabled, to bring the unconscious of his make-up into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of Whitman, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of the literary herd of the midwest. The man who first said “It is never too late to mend” has much to answer for. ”

“ In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman’s saloon in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
“Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,” he thought, coming to a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. “It gets into all modern life. ”

“ Brown cloth stamped in dark brown.
Contents: Editor’s introduction; The chronology of Sherwood Anderson’s life and books; A selected bibliography on Sherwood Anderson. From Winesburg, Ohio: Hands; The philosopher; Godliness; The strength of God; The teacher; Loneliness; Departure. Poor white. Selected stories: The contract; The egg; I’m a fool; The man who became a woman; A meeting South; Death in the woods. Men and women: Four American impressions: Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis; Dreiser. Reportage and editorial: The American county fair ”

“ Tom touched some mechanism connected with the engine of the car and it shot suddenly forward. “Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the road there,” he cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into the darkness through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe, and on the back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight and as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. “The damn fools!” he cried. “They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try. They want to go on in their old hand-made way. ”

“ Marvellous germ-and sperm-plasm for a poet; wondrous parentage for one destined to be absorbed by the visual fancies of his unconscious, to see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire with William Blake. No wonder Sherwood Anderson has often been called a “nut.” He is not averse to being thought a little insane, but he has been stung to the quick by charges of “personal immorality.” One with such ancestry is perhaps not so likely to be an invert as a poet, but it is from similar ancestry that they both not infrequently come. ”

“ The imaginary man, suggested to her mind by her father's words, became every moment more and more a reality. Before her eyes danced the laughing eyes of the young man who for a moment had lingered beside her while Kate Chanceller talked to his companion that evening when they had been challenged on the streets of Columbus. She remembered the young school teacher, who had held her in his arms through a long Sunday afternoon, and the day when, as an awakening maiden, she had heard Jim Priest talking to the laborers in the barn about the sap that ran up the tree. ”

“ On the floor of the shop were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. “He must have been in there and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there with the man he had killed. It's the craziest thing any man ever done.”
The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him, stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. His shirt was torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainly seen in the uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood that had dried and was now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale of his triumph. ”

“ She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman. I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that room."
Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her," he explained. "Then I began to tell her about my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn't. I felt just as I did about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never come back any more." ”

“ Young Sherwood, known as “Jobby”—the boy always ready to work—showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde respected: 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 Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold paint. ”

“ Trilling, Lionel. “Sherwood Anderson,” Kenyon Review 3:293-302 Summer 1941. Reprinted with [100] revisions in his The liberal imagination. New York, Viking, 1950. p.24-33; Anchor Books, 1958. p.20-31; and in Aldridge, John Watson, ed. Critiques and essays on modern fiction. New York, Ronald [1952] p.319-27.
778. Tugwell, Rexford Guy. “An economist reads Dark laughter,” New Republic 45:87-88 December 9, 1925.
779. Untermeyer, Louis. Heavens. New York, Harcourt, Brace [1922] p.70-71.
780. Van Doren, Carl. “Sherwood Anderson,” in his Contemporary American novelists, 1900-1920. ”

“ The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition.”
“But not by us, not by you, Sam,” she plead. “After all, he is my father.”
A stern look came into Sam’s eyes.
“It does not ring right, Sue,” he said coldly; “fathers do not mean much to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. ”

“ Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A feeling of impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to tell her of it. "Everyone talks and talks," he began. "I'm sick of it. I'll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. ”

“ Schiffman, Joseph. “The alienation of the artist: Alfred Stieglitz,” American Quarterly 3:244-57 Fall 1951.
737. Schloss, George. “Sherwood Anderson,” Hudson Review 4:477-80 Autumn 1951. Concerns Schevill’s biography of Anderson.
738. Schyberg, Frederik. Moderne amerikansk litteratur, 1900-1930. København, Gyldendal, 1930. p.63-71.
739. Sergel, Christopher. “Haunting voices; adapter of ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ recalls days in Chicago with Anderson,” New York Times February 2, 1958, section II, p.3.
740. Sergel, Roger. “The man and the memory,” Newberry Library Bulletin ser.2,no.2:44-51 December 1948. ”

“ Ford, Corey. “Three rousing cheers!!! The parody adventures of our youthful heroes. VI. ‘And here let us say good-by’ or, Beer and light Winesburg,” Bookman (N.Y.) 62:682-84 February 1926.
813. Markey, Gene. Literary lights, a book of caricatures. New York, Knopf, 1923. (unpaged)
814. Patchen, Kenneth. “We’re all fools (for Sherwood Anderson) ,” Story 19:87 September-October 1941. Poem.
815. Roskolenko, Harry. “Ballad; for Sherwood Anderson,” Poetry 59:243 February 1942. Poem.
816. ⸺. “Hello towns,” Story 19:36 September-October 1941. Poem.
817. Spratling, William Philip. ”

“ He looked hard at the child and began to address her, paying no more attention to the father. "There is a woman coming," he said, and his voice was now sharp and earnest. "I have missed her, you see. Shed id not come in my time. You may be the woman. It would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as this, when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is as yet only a child."
The shoulders of the stranger shook violently, and when he tried to roll a cigarette the paper fell from his trembling fingers. He grew angry and scolded. ”

“ With me it's like with every one else: nothing venture nothing gain.”
Joe crawled out of the fence corner and went stealthily along the road behind Hugh. A fervor seized him and he thought he would like to creep close and touch with his finger the hem of Hugh's coat. Afraid to try anything so bold his mind took a new turn. He ran in the darkness along the road toward town and, when he had crossed the bridge and come to the New York Central tracks, turned west and went along the tracks until he came to the new factory. ”

“ I am the tale-teller, the man who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of the forests of fancy. ”

“ Even in Chicago where the silence of nights was cut and slashed by a thousand noises, by automobiles whirling through the streets, by the belated footsteps of men homeward bound along the cement sidewalks after midnight, by the shouts of quarreling men drunk on summer nights, even in the great hubbub of noises there was comparative quiet. ”

“ The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of woodlands—remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a boy—and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms. ”

“ The poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children crying—all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life. ”

“ Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness. "You see, I've got to strike out. I've got to get to work. It's what I'm good for."
Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of admiration swept over her. "This is as it should be," she thought. "This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires that had been invading her body were swept away and she sat up very straight on the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning lit up the eastern sky. ”

“ In the end he decided that he was simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity. "I'm made to go to work. I may be able to make a place for myself by steady working, and I might as well be at it," he decided.
Seth went to the house of Banker White and. stood in the darkness by the front door. On the door hung a heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced into the village by Helen White's mother, who had also organized a woman's club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. ”