Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio

HANDS, concerning Wing Biddlebaum

PAPER PILLS, concerning Doctor Reefy

MOTHER, concerning Elizabeth Willard

THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival

NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion

GODLINESS (Parts I), concerning Jesse Bentley

GODLINESS (Parts II), concerning Jesse Bentley

SURRENDER (Part III), concerning Louise Bentley

TERROR (Part IV), 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

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 week-end 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 anyone who reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in

1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly

after Lionel Trilling’s influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack

from which Anderson’s reputation would never quite recover. Trilling

charged Anderson with indulging 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

Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, 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, perhaps fearing I might have

to surrender an admiration 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 effective account 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 perhaps 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 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,” 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