Winesburg, Ohio | Page 4

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 ranked as a significant
literary figure. In 1921 the dis- tinguished literary magazine The Dial
awarded him its first annual literary prize of $2,000, the significance of
which is perhaps best understood if one also knows that the second
recipient was T. S. Eliot. But Anderson's moment of glory was brief, no
more than a decade, and sadly, the remaining years until his death in
1940 were marked by a sharp decline in his literary standing. Somehow,
except for an oc- casional story like the haunting "Death in the Woods,"
he was unable to repeat or surpass his early success. Still, about
Winesburg, Ohio and a small number of stories like "The Egg" and
"The Man Who Became a Woman" there has rarely been any critical
doubt.
No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appear- ance than a number of
critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the
espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such
tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and
stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always
ambiva- lent) has faded into