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Sherwood Anderson and William C. Stewart at Today

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By Mary E. Stewart

I have no idea what my parents expected when they moved to New York for my father’s job with Today magazine. My father, William C. (Bill) Stewart , was managing editor of Today from the first issue until April 1935. This was the reason for his initial contact with Sherwood Anderson. They became friends, and my parents visited the Andersons at Ripshin. Their friendship continued even after Bill left Today and there was no business reason to maintain contact.

Bill was born in Brownwood, Texas, in 1907. He was interested in writing and drawing from an early age. He was on the staff of various publications at his high school, including serving as editor-in-chief of The Tattler, a semi-monthly magazine. Several of his drawings were included in the yearbook. He stayed in Brownwood to attend Howard Payne College and to work for the Brownwood Bulletin. He left Howard Payne after a disagreement with the faculty regarding his work on the college paper. The story I remember hearing was that he had written an article saying people should be allowed to smoke on campus, and the college did not approve of smoking or writing in favor of it. In 1928 he spent his vacation driving through the South and writing about his experiences. Shortly after this, he left the Bulletin to work for Scripps-Howard papers in Memphis and Birmingham. From the Birmingham Post, Bill went to Southbridge, Massachusetts.1

Bill’s job at Today was part of a continuing business relationship with V.V. McNitt, of the McNaught Syndicate, lasting until the mid-1950s. McNitt bought the Southbridge News in 1931 and hired Bill as managing editor. In 1932, Bill married Bernadette (Bern) Lavin of Worcester, Massachusetts. Bill returned to the Southbridge News after working for Today. The family moved to California as a result of McNitt’s purchase of the Westwood Hills Press.

Averill Harriman, Vincent Astor, and Harriman’s sister, Mrs. Mary Rumsey, were the financial backers of Today. Raymond Moley resigned as Assistant Secretary of State to become editor of Today. To answer questions as to whether Moley was leaving because of his conflicts with Secretary Hull, McNitt said that this was not a sudden decision. They had considered buying the Washington Post for Moley to edit. This did not happen because they were unwilling to pay more than $552,000 for the Post.2

Eugene Meyer bought the Post for $825,000 shortly after he resigned as governor of the Federal Reserve Board.3 McNitt was brought in as executive editor to provide journalism expertise. McNaught Syndicate handled Moley’s newspaper feature, and McNitt had worked with Mrs. Rumsey on a previous project. McNitt stayed until December 1933, and the executive editor position was vacant from that date until April 1935.

The first issue of Today (October 28, 1933) promised that Sherwood Anderson would be one of the contributors; “No Swank,” a story about Henry Wallace, appeared two weeks later. Bill’s files do not include any correspondence about “No Swank” as an article. When it was published in 1934 as part of a collection of articles under the same title, Today did not receive a review copy even after several requests. Bill wrote to Sherwood and Eleanor asking them to order a copy for Today. A copy was sent and a brief review was included on the January 26, 1935, book page of Today.

“Explain! Explain! Again Explain!,” discussing the need for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to explain his ideas to the American people, ran on December 2, 1933, as a letter to the editor. The galley proof shows that just enough was taken out to make the letter and Moley’s reply fit on one page. Moley’s answer was to tell Anderson to go travel around and send back stories that Today would print to explain the views of the people. This served to introduce the first series of articles.

“At the Mine Mouth,” from Charleston, West Virginia (December 30, 1933), was apparently not part of the series, as the CCC camp story is later referred to as the first, and a March 8, 1934, letter refers to the completion of six of the eight articles. The cover letters for both the West Virginia and CCC stories are addressed to Bill “Stuart.” By the end of January 1934, when the next article was sent in, the spelling had been corrected to Stewart. The CCC story ran February 10, and the series continued through May 26, usually every two weeks. The travel for the series was completed and the last story submitted by April 5. At this point, the letters were still business letters dealing with stories and expenses. The only unusual comment occurs in a letter (February 28, 1934) from Durham, North Carolina. Anderson was planning to go from Durham to Knoxville and said: “Will loiter along, talking it over with them. You’d better come join me.” Bill’s brief time at a Memphis paper would not have provided any business reason for such a trip, and there is no further mention of the idea.

Bill and Bern made three visits to Ripshin. The first was in 1934. The others were in 1935 and 1938. In May 1934, when Anderson asked Bill to send Today to Ripshin during the summer, he included an invitation to visit. Today generally did not carry fiction, but an updated letter from Bill suggests that Anderson send in a story for use during the summer and also says that he hopes to take advantage of the invitation to visit. The June 22 letter acknowledging receipt of the story (“Virginia Justice,” Today, July 21, 1934), again mentions a hope to visit. The visit apparently occurred in late July, as Bill’s July 12 letter to the Andersons thanks them for travel directions and mentions a Friday night or Saturday morning arrival. None of the photographs of Ripshin in the family album are dated 1934.

In April 1934, Anderson had written to Bill suggesting he discuss with Moley the idea of Anderson visiting Cleveland to interview those who had been industrial and banking leaders in 1925-29. Nothing further is mentioned about this, but August letters mention a proposal for a trip around the Midwest in the fall. This trip was approved, and the first article, “Sherwood Anderson Goes Home,” ran on December 8. It was about small-town Ohio. An article on Floyd B. Olson, governor of Minnesota, was modified to delete information on Olson’s background that had been covered in two articles by Fred Kelly. According to Bill’s letter to Eleanor, neither writer had known the other was working on Olson, but when Anderson’s article ran, the readers were told this was the conclusion of a three-part series.

After the Middle West trip, the Andersons headed for Brownsville, Texas. Bill, as a Texan, never really got used to the grapefruit available in the Northeast. It was picked green, shipped in ice cars, and never ripened properly.

The story on the Rio Grande Valley, “Valley Apart,” appeared on April 20, 1935. This was the first issue of Today that did not list William C. Stewart as managing editor. There had been changes at the magazine; a January letter mentioned that W.P. Beazell (the assistant editor) had left and Bill had been given additional duties. A newspaper clipping in the Stewart files says that on April 9 Filmore Hyde, who had been assistant editor of News-Week, would become executive editor of Today. The clipping also mentions that William Stewart would be returning to the McNaught Syndicate. The executive editor position had been vacant since McNitt had returned to the Syndicate. The changes were continuing in June when Fred Kelly wrote to Bill that he was out because of the “new policy.” Kelly had traveled for Today, reporting from Austria and the Soviet Union as well as doing domestic stories. Today eventually was merged into Newsweek. Who Was Who says that Moley was editor of Today 1933-37 and contributing editor of Newsweek 1937-68.4

Puzzled America did not have an acknowledgment that some articles had appeared in Today. When Anderson wrote to Roger Sergel (April 24, 1935,) about this and said that this “will cost me my job with them, as Moley is terribly sensitive to slights,”5 he already knew that Bill was no longer with Today. Bill had written, at the end of March, that he would be leaving Today for reasons he would tell him later. Anderson’s reply was: “It’s odd. Eleanor had a hunch. As she was going down stairs she suddenly got the conviction that you were no longer at Today and there, at the hotel desk, was your letter.” I don’t remember hearing any discussion of the changes at Today or my father’s reason for leaving. I know that he gave Moley as a reference years later when McNitt sold his paper in Los Angeles, so apparently the departure was not hostile.

The Stewarts went to Ripshin Farm again in 1935. Other guests were there at the same time including Waldi Van Eck, from Holland, and Elise and Julius Friend, from New Orleans. Most of the photos from that trip are of Sherwood with his dog.

“Valley Apart” mentioned houses on wheels and described one that had been built by its owner, a man from Kansas. “The house was what it was, built on an automobile truck chassis, It had a kitchen, with a regular farm kitchen stove, the stovepipe going up through the ceiling, and a very comfortable-seeming sleeping and living room” (“Valley Apart,” Today, March 20, 1935, p. 22). Early in 1936, Anderson wrote to Bill suggesting that Bill and Bern travel around America, possibly in a little house attached to the car. The idea was that Bill could write about what he saw from the point of view of a tourist. Years later, when Bill sent a copy of this and other letters to Eleanor, he commented that his response had probably been that Sherwood could do a better job with this idea. Whatever Bill had said, Anderson was almost apologetic: “You got me wrong about that other thing. It came into my head as a thing you and Bern might do to give you more freedom. Suppose I take to wandering so naturally I think everyone would like it.” Bill also said that Ernie Pyle did something similar for United Features.

The Stewarts also visited Ripshin in 1938. In June, Eleanor had invited them to come sometime after July 20. They drove down from Southbridge in a Rolls Royce. The car made it into Anderson’s diary and also into a photo under some trees at Ripshin. It had originally belonged to Albert B. Wells, also of Southbridge. Rolls Royce had a plant in Springfield, about thirty miles from Southbridge. Wells had the car built to his specifications when business at the plant was slow in the early 1930s. He took the car to his other home in Southern California for awhile. When he decided to sell it, he took it back to Southbridge and sold it through the local Chrysler dealer.6 The last picture of the Rolls in the Stewart family album is dated 1940. When the Stewarts left Ripshin on July 29, 1938, Sherwood’s diary says they were “very satisfactory guests.” On August 3, Eleanor wrote asking for the “negative of the picture of Sherwood and the dog.” Bill sent the negatives for two pictures and promised to send a set of pictures from the recent trip. In the collection of letters edited by Howard Mumford Jones, the picture opposite page 402 is dated 1938. However, the wording of Eleanor’s letter and Bill’s reply indicate it is from the 1935 trip. Also it is in the family album with pictures labeled 1935, and the border on the print matches the 1935 rather than the 1938 prints. The 1938 pictures include several in the chairs that tip upside down.

The August 3 letter also says “Sherwood got your picture yesterday and took it to be framed.” This was a picture Bill sent as part of the “rogues gallery” at Ripshin. When Bill wrote to Eleanor after Sherwood’s death in 1941, he mentioned that they had just missed each other in New York. The letter also referred to pictures taken three years before including one of Eleanor in the chair that tipped over backwards. He expressed the hope that Mary could meet Eleanor right side up. This did happen when Eleanor made a trip to the West Coast for the YWCA, after we had moved to California.

My father had always been interested in history. A book he mentioned to Sherwood was never published, but some of the research may have been the basis for newspaper articles. After moving to California, Bill began tracing his family and found that his people had lived in the Virginia hills, before moving on. His research was published by state historical societies and the National Genealogical Society, but he never had a chance to return to Virginia. Bill continued his newspaper work and was employed by the Los Angeles Times when he died in 1968. Bern stayed in California and died in 1989.

The photos on the wall and in the album made it clear to me as a child that Sherwood Anderson was an author my parents had known. As far as I remember, we did not read any of his stories in school. In fact, when I mentioned his name in a class, the teacher thought I was talking about Robert Sherwood. “Stolen Day” is included in the anthology my seventh grade classes use. My students enjoy seeing pictures, so I show the ones I have, including Sherwood with his dog.

NOTES

1. Brownwood Bulletin February 28, 1933, various undated clippings
2.Editor & Publisher, September 2, 1933.
3. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1979), p, 55.
4. Who Was Who in America, vol. 6, 1974-76, 288.
5. Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 313.
6. Albert B. Wells “Sequel to the Story of a Gallant Old Rolls Royce,” Westwood Hills Press, letter, no date.

Remembered "Characters" in Winesburg, Ohio

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By Welford Dunaway Taylor

Critics and biographers have paid scant attention to the sketches that Sherwood Anderson wrote for the trade magazine Agricultural Advertising between 1902 and 1905. A possible reason is that this juvenilia, produced well before Anderson had developed into a writer of serious fiction, has been overshadowed (justifiably) by the mature work he was to produce some ten years later. Thus, James Schevill may be correct in discounting its significance by asserting that “the only importance of these first attempts at writing is that they uncover Anderson’s youthful character” (38). However, a more probable and practical cause for neglect is the obscurity of the periodical itself, which has heretofore made the material inaccessible to all but the most intrepid researchers.

Ray White’s inclusion of the Agricultural Advertising pieces in his edition Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings (1989) [hereinafter EW], seems likely to alter the existing perception. Although the volume’s stated purpose is to provide access, rather than to make critical claims, the fact that it makes the texts readily available invites broader study and even the possibility of inclusion under that increasingly troublesome rubric, the “canon.” Although in this initial body of published work Anderson wrote in the accepted and facile idiom of the advertising copywriter (a style he would later denounce as “slick”), I maintain that these efforts are deserving of more than summary dismissal, if for no other reason than that they form part of the textual record of a seminal American author. However, two groups of the Agricultural Advertising pieces–the “Rot and Reason” and the “Business Types” series–reveal much more. For one, they feature a consistent, and as yet unacknowledged use of a standard literary device which, although self-consciously applied, prefigures a dominant trait found in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson’s masterpiece. Moreover, given this link to the later work, the sketches serve as at least a partial corrective to the popular myth that Anderson’s literary career began with the pivotal moment in 1912 when, in a sudden, Caedmon-like epiphany, he rejected commercialism for literature by walking out of his business office never to return. To a degree the myth persists, despite the mitigating efforts of several well-informed investigators to show that the author of Winesburg, Ohio had undergone a long, if rather sparsely documented, apprenticeship. Therefore, determining the literary dimensions of his initial step into publication may serve to enhance the efforts to reconstruct this erratic pattern.

In 1900, just after graduating from Wittenburg Academy, Sherwood Anderson joined the Frank B. White Company in Chicago as an advertising solicitor. The position had been made possible through his friend Marco Morrow, an executive with the company. Some two years later, Anderson began writing occasional articles on farming topics for the company magazine, Agricultural Advertising, which Morrow edited. Early in 1903 Morrow placed Anderson in charge of “Rot and Reason,” a monthly feature in the magazine. Anderson wrote “Rot and Reason” articles from February to October, 1903. From January to October,1904 he supplied the columns for “Business Types” in the same magazine. Then, after contributing two additional, but unrelated, feature articles in the spring of 1905, Anderson terminated his formal connection with the company (which was by now absorbed into the Long-Critchfield Agency) to pursue a more active and independent course in business.

There is much thematic similarity between the two series, “Rot and Reason” and “Business Types.” This is partially summarized by Kim Townsend as “Sherwood Anderson discovering and exploring what it was that mattered to him–which is to say, himself, an American man, discovering himself in writing” (47). But these articles also show Anderson making important discoveries about creative expression in prose, even within the narrow guidelines of Agricultural Advertising. It is one such early discovery, of which he made repeated use, that I hope to demonstrate as a link between the articles in these early series and Anderson’s most mature artistry.

Beginning with “The Traveling Man,” one of three subheadings of his first “Rot and Reason” column, Anderson indulges in a brief passage that sketches, in broad outline, some commonly recognized features of the traveling salesman. His description runs as follows:

Common to the verge of imbecility, dressed as only a fool would dress nowadays, and having as his chief stock of trade a fund of vile and indecent stories, he went forth with his soap, his cigars and his ladies’ underwear to smear the path of all decent men who must follow him for years to come. I have been told that occasionally specimens of this tribe may yet be found in all their unwashed unloveliness in out-of-the-way places about the country, but they are going, and thank Providence they will soon be gone. (EW 23-4)

The passage is unremarkable, except that it initiates a genre that recurs with some frequency in the remaining “Rot and Reason” columns and becomes, in turn, the predominant configuration of the subsequent “Business Types” series. By standard literary definition this is “character writing,” a tradition deriving from a Greek prototype created by Theophrastus in the third century B.C.; revived and adapted early in the seventeenth century by such English practitioners as Sir Thomas Overbury, John Earle, and Joseph Hall; and re-adapted later in the seventeenth century in France by Jean de La Bruyère. As demonstrated by Anderson’s depiction of the traveling salesman, the “character” typified a combination of definite, if obvious, qualities. The portrayal is not of an individualized personality; rather, it is a type, one usually emblematic of a particular cultural or social classification. In Overbury’s metaphorical definition, it is “a quick and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musical close; it is wit’s descant on any plain song” (Witherspoon and Warnke 203).

Thus, beginning with the traveling salesman, a central if obvious figure in the mythos of American commercialism, Anderson proceeded in the “Rot and Reason” columns to present miniatures of other “types” easily recognizable to the readers of Agricultural Advertising. Prominent among the many are the American businessman (“Boost No.1,” EW 37); the successful modern farmer (“The Golden Harvest Farmer,” EW 43-45); the spoiler in business (“The Golden Fake,” EW 46); and the burned-out businessman (“The Born Quitter,” EW 27). In all these examples, the defining lineaments of the “character” tradition remain more or less consistent, especially the attempt to present the generalized category, one embodying an identity derived from a context that the reader will recognize immediately.

The “Rot and Reason” columns reveal, however, that Anderson was beginning even at this early juncture to experiment with techniques that advanced the delineation of his business “characters” well beyond a generalized typicality. For example, in several instances, rather than present a collection of defining characteristics, he illustrates character by means of an anecdote, either hypothetical or personal. The earliest example is “The Born Quitter,” one of the subheadings for his second (March, 1903) “Rot and Reason” column (EW 27). Here he pairs off an aggressive young businessman type with his burned-out counterpart.

This presentation of character through anecdote is superseded the following month by a more rounded, parable-like sketch titled “Packingham” (EW 30-31), in which a self-made manufacturer is used to illustrate the importance of the love of work to the success ethic. “Packingham” is perhaps the most finished installment in the “Rot and Reason” series, in that the characterization is presented with a minimum of authorial comment. Other “characters” in the series were usually embellished with Anderson’s own slick commentaries on business-related topics and were often followed by a series of aphoristic squibs.

In “Business Types,” the next series Anderson wrote for Agricultural Advertising,the “character” became the primary focus, and a different type was presented for each of the ten months that he produced the column. In many of these depictions Anderson expands the former descriptive mode, often subsuming it within a miniature narrative in which the subject “character” is featured. Of particular note are the installments that draw upon personal experiences, or else upon private concerns that would later be given more intense, and more finished, treatment in the fiction. One article in particular recalls an incident from Anderson’s early working experience with the White firm. It is “The Solicitor” (EW 90-93), which relates how a young account executive is sent out to a particularly intractable client and returns with an order exceeding the original expectation by ten-fold. “The Liar–A Vacation Story” (EW 82-87) combines actual experience and a personal perception that remained a life-long fascination for Anderson. It involves a man with an annoying habit of re-inventing his past to suit present circumstances. This “liar” surprises a skeptical group of listeners with an accurately detailed account of his work in a bicycle factory (one of Anderson’s early jobs). Another narrative, “The Man of Affairs” (EW 70-75), offers readers of the later fiction adumbrations of the novel Poor White (1920) and its protagonist, Hugh McVey. The sketch depicts a young provincial named Peter Macveagh, whose self-made prosperity fails to produce either fulfillment or inner wholeness. “The Boyish Man” (EW 100-102) treats still another enduring Andersonian motif: the retention of a youthful perspective despite advancing age.

In the combined “Rot and Reason” and “Business Types” series, I note twenty-one distinct examples of the “character” genre. The last, “The Fussy Man and the Trimmer” ( EW 102-105)–its title echoing that of Halifax’s “Character of a Trimmer” (1682)–appeared in December 1904, a few months before Anderson left the Long-Critchfield agency to pursue his own entrepreneurial quest.

While some examples contain foreshadowings of the fictional talent that would fully reveal itself almost a decade later, most of this juvenilia reveals certain limitations. Chief among these is the choice of subject. Although his selection of commercial avatars represents a fairly broad spectrum within the type, Anderson has not gone outside American trade and agriculture to look for material. However, this is not so much a reflection of his own parochial interests at the time, as an indication that he was obliged to write within guidelines prescribed by his employer. His audience, moreover, was specialized and limited. He gave readers of Agricultural Advertising the kind of profile with which they were familiar in a style accentuated by clichés and glib banalities.

Unfortunately, minimal documentation exists for Anderson’s life during the decade following the appearance of his final business “character.” What is definitely known is that he was torn between the demands of business and the enticements of literature; of family obligations and the desire to be independent; of writing according to formula and the compelling need to create his own form and voice.

Something of the transforming power of these struggles can be gauged by his article on the “New Note” in literature, published in 1914 in the first two issues of Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, Chicago’s contribution to the burgeoning tide of avant-garde literary magazines. Proclaiming the basis of the new literary order as “craft love,” he insists that the artist with a commitment to craft must “record his own mood . . . simply, and without pretense or windiness” (EW 123). “I myself believe,” he continues, “that when a man can thus stand aside from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other minds” (Ibid.). Within a year and a half, in a singular voice that spoke in “a kind of poetry” with “word . . . laid against word in just a certain way” so as to give “a kind of word color, a march of simple words and sentences” (Memoirs 243). Anderson began recording the often troubled “inner workings” of the fictional citizenry of Winesburg, Ohio.

As they began appearing in 1915-16, the impressionistic story-sketches in which these characters are featured would strike sympathetic readers as novel and revolutionary and skeptical traditionalists as eccentric and bizarre. I submit, however, that this gallery of repressed individuals, however much they evoke the precepts of an emerging American modernist, were not the wholly fresh creations that they are presumed to be. Rather, the basic pattern of their delineation recalls the one-dimensional “characters” of more than a decade before.

While acknowledging that there is credible internal evidence, both thematic and formalistic, for establishing this connection, I believe that it is reflected most decisively and consistently in the actual titles of the Winesburg stories. For, recalling that Anderson’s object in his initial use of hypothetical “characters” was to illustrate a general principle, we see the pattern repeated in Winesburg, Ohio with comparable frequency.

As they appear on the first edition contents page–which is titled, appropriately, “The Tales and the Persons”– all save two of the twenty-four titles express an abstract, or at least a generalized, category (see Appendix). Ten of them are clearly abstractions. These, in their order of appearance, are: “Godliness,” “Adventure,” “Respectability,” “Tandy,” “Loneliness,” “‘Queer’,” “Drink,” “Death,” “Sophistication,” and “Departure.” More to the point, five of the other titles reveal a particular classification, or “type,” of person. These are: “Mother,” “The Philosopher,” “A Man of Ideas,” “The Thinker,” and “The Teacher.”

It should also be noted that during the winter of 1915-16, while Anderson wrote the majority of the Winesburg stories, he published in Little Review and The Smart Set three others (which do not appear in the book) with titles denoting similar categories of person: “Sister,” “The Story Writers,” and “The Novelist.” From the eight person/type examples stated above–the five in Winesburg and the three not included–it seems obvious that in selecting titles for his emerging corpus of mature short fiction, Anderson was repeating a design from his former commercial “character” writing. In its Winesburg incarnation, however, the “character” is neither a mere generality nor a hypothetical emblem of a broad principle. Rather, each is a distinct fictional entity serving as a concrete illustration of a broad category. Thus, for example, the character Elizabeth Willard is but a half-component of the complete entry, which reads: “Mother–concerning Elizabeth Willard.” Indeed, following twenty-three of the story titles in the table of contents (i. e., excepting “The Book of the Grotesque”) is the name of a fictional character who serves as exemplification for the title category (see Appendix).

That this was a conscious design on Anderson’s part seems to be affirmed in part by the revisions of various of the individual titles (White, “Story Titles” 6-7). The original manuscript form of nine titles (their earliest manifestation) appeared as individualized designations (see below). However, all of these were changed in the manuscript to the form in which they appear on the first edition contents page. In each case, the original designation has been expanded from a particularized into a more generalized, or in some cases an abstract, form. Though this transformation varies in degree from title to title–ranging from the substitution of one article for another (“An Untold Lie” (ms.) “The Untold Lie” (1st ed.), to amplifying a personalized or particular instance into an abstract category (“George Leaves Winesburg” (ms.) “Departure” (1st ed.)–the revisions to all nine titles indicate the common pattern. The full list of these changes is as follows:

  • Manuscript………………….. First Edition
  • Grotesques ………………….The Book of the Grotesque
  • George Willard’s Mother ……Mother
  • Her Adventure ………………Adventure
  • Wash Williams……………….Respectability
  • The School Teacher………….The Teacher
  • Alone…………………………Loneliness
  • George Willard’s Awakening..An Awakening
  • An Untold Lie………………..The Untold Lie
  • George Leaves Winesburg……Departure

As a corollary to the above model, five manuscript titles that began as abstract or generalized designations–“Hands,” “The Strength of God,” “‘Queer’,” “Death,” and “Sophistication”–remain unchanged in the first edition. Thus, in revising those manuscript titles that denoted a particular, as opposed to a general or abstract quality, Anderson was apparently bringing them into conformity with the overall principle of suggesting universality through abstract categories, all of which are illustrated by concrete exemplar/characters.

It is worth noting that in one of the earliest and most detailed commentaries on Winesburg, Ohio, Harry Hansen made repeated reference to the stories as depictions of “types.” Asserting that they qualified Anderson’s name to be linked with that of Chekhov, Hansen argued:

[The characters’] universality . . . is distinct; they are types to be found in any community. But the narcissus character of most individuals, who look into a mirror and thereupon pronounce all the world beautiful, will not let them acknowledge the typical character of Anderson’s people. These critics apply the terms abnormal, subnormal, delinquent, vicious, and other epithets that are in current use to designate a variation from the normal and average . . . [But] after all, he was entitled to the right of selection. (148)

The universality cited by Hansen suggests the broadest possible connotation, compared to which the sphere of American commerce of which Anderson had written more than a decade before is a tiny component. What had begun as commonplace prototypes (“The Born Quitter,” “The Lightweight”) had been transformed into fully realized fictional creations, such as Wing Biddlebaum, Doctor Reefy, and The Reverend Curtis Hartman. All of the Winesburg characters play emblematic roles, as had their predecessors. However, the nature of this function points up another distinctive feature of Anderson’s mature artistry. The commercial “characters” had represented conventional, everyday concerns of farming and commerce. The Winesburg characters exemplify matters that were anything but conventional. The village minister’s libido is obviously stronger than “The Strength of God” that he represents and professes. “Respectability” is exemplified by a cynical and scarred old man who hates all women.

Collectively, the Winesburg stories take received, clichè-like notions of popular concepts and people and re-define them with an apparent guileless frankness and vividness. The contrast between these sophisticated portrayals and those published in a “two-bit trade journal” (Townsend 49-50) a decade before is indeed vast. Yet, for all their amateurishness, these early efforts, through the device of the classical “character,” foreshadow Anderson’s finest work. Given their present accessibility, perhaps these early texts will be mined for additional clues to the origins of Sherwood Anderson’s unique literary talents.

APPENDIX

The complete text of the contents page (less page numbers) appears as follows in the first edition of Winesburg, Ohio: 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 (Parts I and 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.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Sherwood. Early Writings. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Kent and London: Kent State UP, 1989. ______. Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs. Ed. Paul Rosenfeld. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

Hansen, Harry. Midwest Portraits. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923.

Mouscher, Karen-Elisabeth. “Sherwood Anderson: The Early Advertising Years.” Unpublished Dissertation: Northwestern University (1986)

Schevill, James. Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work. Denver: U of Denver P, 1953.

Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

White, Ray Lewis. “Winesburg, Ohio Story Titles.” The Winesburg Eagle 10 (November 1984): 6-7.

Witherspoon, Alexander M. and Frank J. Warnke, eds. Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry. 2nd Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963.

Contributing Writers in this Issue

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About our contributors: Our bibliographer is Margaret Kulis, reference librarian in special collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Mary E. Stewart teaches English and reading at a middle school in South-Central Los Angeles. The family interest in history has taken her into the Middle Ages as Ealasaid Catriona nyn Uilleim in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Welford Dunaway Taylor is James A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond. He is the founding editor of the Winesburg Eagle and co-editor, with Charles E. Modlin, of the recently published Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson.

Bradbury Responds

A copy of the Summer 1997 issue of the Winesburg Eagle, containing the article “‘That Always Autumn Town’: Winesburg, Ohio and the Fiction of Ray Bradbury,” was mailed to Mr. Bradbury by the essayist, James E. Person, Jr. Not long afterward, Jim received the following brief, kind reply from the author of Dandelion Wine: Dear James Person:

Thanks, much thanks, for your article on “Winesburg” and Green Town! Hard for me to judge the “resemblances of things past” (as ’twere) but I found it all fascinating. I will keep and treasure your text!

With gratitude,
Ray Bradbury
Sept. 6, 1997

Plans are underway to transform the Winesburg Eagle into a journal to be named The Sherwood Anderson Review. Details of this change will be announced later.

A Sherwood Anderson Checklist 1996

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By Margaret Kulis

Current Listings

A. Books and Dissertations
1. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg Ohio: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 2. Cox, Karen Castellucci. “Merging Fictions: Community, Memory, and the Twentieth Century Story Cycle.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1996.

3. Gaterud, John. “The Jigsaw of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Puzzled America’.” Ph.D. diss., The Union Institute, 1996.

4. Gibson, Todd. “Racing with the World: Hybridity and the Construction of American Literary Modernism.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996.

5. Simolke, Duane Mac. “Stein, Gender, Isolation, and Industrialism: New Readings of “Winesburg, Ohio’.” Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech. University, 1996.

6. Steinecke, Ann. “Revolt from the Village: Place and Anxiety in Modern American Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1996.

B. Articles, Chapters, and Discussions

1. [unsigned]. Review of Winesburg, Ohio (audio version) by Sherwood Anderson. In Kliatt 30 (January 1996): 53.

2. Allen, John. “Unity in Winesburg, Ohio: The Interdependence of Communication, Isolation and Physical Description.” The Winesburg Eagle 21 (Winter 1996): 7-10.

3. Anderson, David D. “Photography and The Written Word.” Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter 26 (Spring 1996): 3-7.

4. Anderson, David D. “Sherwood Anderson and Hart Crane: A Temporary Friendship.” Society for the Study of Midwestern Literarture Newsletter 26 (Summer 1996): 8-14.

5. Anderson, Peter and Charles Modlin. “John Sherwood Anderson.” The Winesburg Eagle 21 (Summer 1996): 11-12.

6. Anderson, Sherwood. “‘Give Me the City.'” The Winesburg Eagle 21 (Summer 1996): 1-2.

7. Anderson, Sherwood. “Green Tea.” In Sins of the Fathers: An Anthology of Clerical Crime. London: Victor Gollancz, 1996.

8. Anderson, Sherwood. “Home.” In Late Haverst: Rural American Writing. New York: Smithmark, 1996.

9. Anderson, Sherwood. “In einer fremden Stadt” [In a Strange Town].

Translated by Juergen Dierking. Stint: Zeitschrift fur Literartur 20 (November 1996): 118-130.

10. Anderson, Sherwood. “[On Writing] ‘I¹m A Fool.'” Winesburg Eagle 21 (Winter 1996): 1.

11. Anderson, Sherwood. “Windy McPherson¹s Son” (excerpt) in “Madness Was His Muse.” Chicago Tribune, 14 April 1996, Sec. 10, p. 22, col. 1.

12. Anderson, Sherwood. “The Owensboro School Bond Editorials.” The Winesburg Eagle 21 (Summer 1996): 6-8.

13. Campbell, Hilbert. “The ‘Shadow People’: Feodor Sologub and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio. Studies in Short Fiction “ 22 (Winter 1996): 51-58.

14. Cantor, M. Review of Our America “ by Walter B. Michaels. In Choice “ 33 (March 1996): 1135.

15. Fahlman, Betsy. “Arnold Ronnebeck and Alfred Stieglitz: Remembering the Hill.” History of Photography “ 20 (Winter 1996): 304-311.

16. Granger, Bill. “Sherwood Anderson: His Anger Fueled His Pen.” Chicago Tribune,” 14 April 1996, Sec. 10, p. 24, col. 1.

17. Kulis, Margaret. “A Sherwood Anderson Checklist: 1994.” Winesburg Eagle “ 21 (Winter 1996): 10-12.

18. Modlin, Charles. “Sherwood Anderson’s Kentucky Connections.” Winesburg Eagle “ 21 (Winter 1996): 1-5.

19. Ryan, Dennis. “‘A Divine Gesture’: Hemingway¹s Complex Parody of the Modern.” Hemingway Review “ 16 (Fall 1996): 1-17.

20. Samway, Patrick H. Review of Carolina Moon “ by Jill McCorkle. In America “ 175 (September 21, 1996): 31.

21. Sargeson, Frank. “Sherwood Anderson.” The Winesburg Eagle “ 21 (Winter 1996): 6.
22. Seymour-Smith, Martin; Kimmens, Andrew C., eds. “Sherwood Anderson.” In World Authors, 1900-1950, “ 47-9. H. W. Wilson, 1996.

23. Shuman R. B. Review of Large Animals in Everyday Life “ by Wendy Brenner. In Choice “ 34 (October 1996): 275.

24. Spear, David M. “Marion ‘Mimi’ Anderson Spear.” Winesburg Eagle “ 21 (Summer 1996): 9-10.

25. Tuttleton, James W. “Sherwood Anderson: A Room of His Own.” In Vital Signs; Essays on American Literature and Criticism” by James W. Tuttleton , 273-88. Dee, I.R. , 1996.

26. White, Ray Lewis. “Anderson’s Will and Estate.” The Winesburg Eagle “ 21 (Summer 1996): 3-5.

Additional Listings

A. Articles, Chapters, and Discussions 1. Anderson, David. D. “Wanderers and Sojourners: Sherwood Anderson and the People of Winesburg.” Midamerica “ 22 (1995): 89-96. 2. Beasecker, Robert. “Annual Bibliography of Midwestern Literature: 1993.” Midamerica “ 22 (1995): 152.

Sherwood Anderson: Hail

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Troutdale, Virginia had gone to pot after the timber on the surrounding mountains was cut. The false-front stores, Midway Hotel, the home-grown architecture, etc., looked like good material for a woodcut.

J.J. Lankes Woodcut - Troutdale, Virginia

I found myself a comfortable telephone pole to lean against while sketching the main street. In no time all the idle boys were clustered around me. One climbed my pole the better to see the progress of my sketch. As a stranger in town with nothing more masculine to do than make pencil sketches on a sheet of paper, I was legitimate prey to make excitement for the idlers of that sleepy town. That boy right above my head made me uneasy. I felt a necessity to show that I “belonged.”

In an effort to forestall impending mischief I asked casually if any of the boys knew Mr. Anderson.

“Mr. Anderson? No. You know him, Toni?” “Naw, you, Bill?” “Naw, ain’t no Mr. Anderson around here.”

That seemed strange, for on the four-mile drive from Sherwood’s home he was hailed by every man, woman and boy who saw him. It did not make sense that he was not known. Then I recalled that they all called him Sherwood. No one had mistered him.

“Any of you know Sherwood?”

“Sure,” they exclaimed in unison. And with considerable disgust that such a stupid question should be asked of them: “Everybody knows Sherwood.”

J. J. Lankes

Sherwood Anderson and Raymond Carver: Poets of the Losers

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“So have American novelists gained stature by concern for America’s losers.” –Nelson Algren

By Claire Bruyère

I am sometimes impelled to say of a contemporary story “How Andersonian!” without necessarily thinking in terms of influence or filiation. In order to explain what I mean by “Andersonian,” I am going to take a fresh look at Anderson in conjunction with Raymond Carver to find out how each may throw light on the other.1

I will concentrate on Carver’s and Anderson’s short stories, recalling mostly the later ones by Anderson, and their insistent dealings with the character-type called by Americans a “loser.”

This loser is not exactly the clumsy, ill-starred character familiar to readers of Yiddish or Jewish-American literature under the names of “schlemiel” or “schlimazel.” Although bad luck may strike him, he seldom jokes about it. He is an individual who, in one way or another, does not make it or is thought not to have made it, or who thinks he has failed. The emergence of that character in American fiction is linked to the Social Darwinian spirit of the late nineteenth century, so that one of his first incarnations may have been Colonel Sellers, in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age. I keep saying “he” because the idea of the loser would not exist without its opposite, the winner, who is rooted in a firm conception of maleness and virility. Most literary losers, therefore, are men. I don’t mean to say, however, that the losers we are going to encounter are to be perceived in naturalistic terms, that is as mere victims of outside forces.

Nelson Algren in 1961 wrote of American writers’ concern with the losers, of their ‘”search that went down Main Street in Winesburg, Ohio, and down Main Street to the edge of town …on either hand … faces of men and women living without alternatives were revealed.”2 This applies just as well to Raymond Carver, whose stories may be set “on the edge of town,” like “They’re not your husband.” Carver’s often nameless towns have changed little since Anderson’s time.3 His characters are the same ordinary (white) people. However, Carver’s prose, in narrative as in dialogue, is much more “tough” or “hard-boiled” than Anderson’s, closer it seems to Hemingway’s, so that putting Anderson and Carver together is somewhat paradoxical.

The archetypal loser in Anderson’s long works is the character modeled after his own father. In his short stories, the most memorable one is also a father, that of the narrator in “The Egg” (1921). As with Colonel Sellers in The Gilded Age, his failure is commensurate with his ever-renewed confidence. There is no equivalent to this story in Carver’s works, as the theme of the failed go-getter has probably exhausted itself somewhere between Clyde Griffiths and Willy Loman. Carver’s characters do not dream of material success or social recognition; they earn a small living or are unemployed and wish they could afford to repair the fridge when it breaks down (“Preservation”).

Anderson’s losers were not all like the father in “The Egg.” Let us recall for instance his characters in various New Yorker stories of the 1930s. Pop seems neither ambitious nor disillusioned. It is the narrator of that story, Frank Blandin, who guesses at his utter solitude, alleviated only by the drinking which eventually kills him ( “Pop,” 1933). Billy, the copywriter who dreamed of being an artist, writes shameful speeches for his boss and feels avenged when he once socks him in the jaw, saying: “I guess I caught him off balance” (“Off Balance,” 1933). In “His Chest of Drawers” (1939), as in ‘”The Egg” or in “Off Balance,” extreme attention is given to some words or phrases and their multiple meanings. The narrow-chested protagonist gives in to his wife’s and daughters’ power. Bill proclaims they are better than he is and all is as it should be. He just gets drunk now and then. John Wescott, another shy little man (“Two Lovers,” 1939), is dazzled by the glibness and social boldness of a male friend. He misses his dead wife, but he could not communicate much with her when she was alive. We understand that he became a “tippler” long before she died.

None of these stories is a first-person narrative by the major character. There is always a mediator who does a little explaining but refrains from commenting. None of these losers is self-pitying, as was the old man in “The Sad Horn Blowers” or as were some characters in Winesburg, Ohio. Although the pattern of these stories is simple, usually one of counterpoint, they are not the works of a ‘”baffled” or “fumbling” writer, as Anderson was often branded by critics of the thirties, largely on account of his novels of that period.

With Carver’s stories in mind, one realizes the degree of restraint practiced by Anderson. The potential conflicts do not erupt. But Carver’s characters, placed in more extreme or violent situations, are not so remote. In the story entitled “One More Thing,” a drunkard husband thrown out of his house by wife and daughter offers no resistance but gropes for parting words: “He said, ‘ I just want to say one more thing.’ But then he could not think what it could possibly be.”

Here is a sentence that could have been written by either one of these writers: “He had put them off the land. That was all that mattered. Yet he could not understand why he felt something crucial had happened, a failure. But nothing had happened.”

This passage is from ‘”Sixty Acres” by Raymond Carver, an echo of countless similar passages in Sherwood Anderson. In Carver’s story, a man feels he has been cowardly, not daring to chastise poachers on a piece of land that he owns. With Anderson, “something happened” or the same ironic “nothing had happened” is a leitmotif.4

Something must change in the course of a story, and many of Carver’s revolve around change. In “The Compartment,” a father is aboard a train, on the way to Strasbourg to see his son after many years and after a divorce from the boy’s mother. By the time he enters the station, the man has decided not to see his son. He merely rides back. The story is accompanied by quasi-absurdist comic incidents.5 It is akin to “The Return” by Sherwood Anderson, but more powerful because here one understands that in addition to fearing to face his son, the man has not recovered from his divorce.

“Jerry and Molly and Sam” has a more complex pattern. Told in the third person from Al’s point of view, it suggests the man’s guilt and his sorrow. Al, an unfaithful husband, takes it out on a female dog belonging to his children, Suzy. In secret, he tries to get rid of her and abandons her far from the house. Later, awed by his children’s grief, he sneaks away to bring her back, but Suzy snubs him and trots away. His family is falling to pieces. The story ends as follows: “He sat there. He thought he did not feel so bad, all things considered. The world was full of dogs. There were dogs and there were dogs. Some dogs you couldn’t do anything with.” The prose here sounds like Gertrude Stein’s, even if William Gass, in his attack on “that rare disease, minimalism,” denied any connection between the two.6

I won’t discuss Carver in terms of minimalism, since I side with writers like Tobias Wolff or Richard Ford against the critics in questioning such labels.7 Yet there is, in the economical writing of Raymond Carver, an interesting combination of precision, terseness and ellipses, along with vague, indeterminate words and phrases that go back to Stein and Anderson. The critic John Biguenet has made fun of the opening sentence of “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit,” which is: “I’ve seen some things.”8 To him, at that point, Carver ceases to be a true author and “relinquishes authority.” But it is unfair to judge a story on such a short unit, especially one written in the first person. Gertrude Stein used to insist that a paragraph at least was necessary to create a mood or an emotion: “Paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not. Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion but because they register or limit an emotion” (“How to Write” in “What Is English Literature”). The nameless narrator of “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit” cannot express the terrible times he has been through except with the word “thing” and with a pathetic attempt at humour, calling his wife’s ex-lover ‘”Mr. Fixit” and white collar men (he is a blue collar himself) “Mr. Coffees.” At the end of the story his wife, who had left him, returns, and here is the exchange that serves as a conclusion:

“‘Honey,’ I said to Myrna the night she came home. ‘Let’s hug awhile and then you fix us a real nice supper.’

Myrna said, ‘Wash your hands.'”

It is clear that it is these kinds of characters, the “inarticulate” ones, that some readers object to, find unworthy of so much attention, rather than stylistic choices per se.

Carver’s story “The Calm” is more subtle. “I was getting a haircut” is the factual opening. The narrator recalls a conversation heard in a barber shop. There were three other men there, besides the barber. He felt drawn to the barber. “Did you get your deer, Charles?” the barber asked one of the waiting customers. Charles, the hunter, accompanied by his father and his son ( the latter suffering from a hangover), did shoot at a deer and they wounded him, but one understands they gave up the chase and let the animal be the prey of the forest, a violation of the unspoken code of sportsmanship. This started a quarrel in the barber shop. The barber calmed the men down, but the three waiting customers left, leaving the narrator alone with the barber. They were silent. The barber was cutting his hair, standing behind him. The narrator looked at himself in the mirror (a compulsive gesture of Carver’s characters), the barber looked at him while working (“He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it tenderly, as a lover would.”) Then comes the last paragraph, abruptly:

“That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber’s chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber’s fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.”

The caress in the barber’s fingers, which offsets the barbarity of the hunters, is of course most Andersonian, in that the truest form of human communication and sympathy is wordless and physical. It is here a male bond, but the barber is androgynous. He is close to the narrator’s mother in Anderson’s “The Egg,” who soothes her husband by caressing his bald head. The barber becomes both male and female in this reversal of the barber’s role in the last words. His fingers give life, as it were, by making the hair grow again.

Carver proceeds exclusively by juxtaposition, a method often used by Anderson. The initial description of the men in that room reminds us strongly of Anderson’s “The Dumb Man'” (“The story concerns three men in a house in a street…”) . In addition to that, Carver omits all references to time and change at the beginning of the story. He too transgresses the rules and we cannot say that the reader’s role is easy. I imagine that the narrator decided to leave his wife and was led to that decision by identifying with “Mr. Buck,” the wounded deer.9

Is the narrator a loser? There is no hint of any happiness having resulted from that decision. The emphasis in the text is on place, but the implication of the final scene with the barber is that such moments are most precious, all there are perhaps–and that perception is totally Andersonian as well.

Anderson and Carver both resort to symbolic objects that often give their titles to the stories; the egg, the brown coat, the milk bottles, a chest of drawers are some of Anderson’s; candy sacks, a bridle, a vacuum cleaner, plaster teeth are in Carver’s magic box; and the two introduce animals solely for that purpose. But this has been a staple of the modern short story since Maupassant and Chekhov. What is remarkable is the intensity of life imparted to certain objects, by Carver in particular. “Why Don’t You Dance?” is a case in point. None of the three characters in that short story is described at all. We are made to guess at their emotions through the part played by a long list of objects–those that used to furnish the man’s bedroom when his wife was still there and that he has put out in his yard for sale. The things are described no more than the people, but their transfer from the intimacy of the bedroom to the nakedness of the yard is enough. The man’s unhappiness is suggested by his constant drinking and by his trivial exchange with the young couple that has wandered in. An example:

” Hello,” the man said to the girl. “You found the bed. That’s good.”

“Hello,” the girl said, and got up. “I was just trying it out.” She patted the bed. ‘”It’s a pretty good bed.” “It’s a good bed,” the man said.

The third-person point of view shifts back and forth from the man to the “girl.” He, looking at this newly formed couple, sees all its potentialities but remains noncommittal: “In the lamplight, there was something about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling.” Later, there is a moment of physical sympathy between the girl and the man as they dance, all the while conscious, and not unpleasantly, of the neighbours who stare at the weird scene. In the epilogue (last paragraph), the girl tries to tell a friend about the episode, but she gives up–she cannot find the words. What we keep in mind is unreal, yet precise, cruel, and dreamlike. Everything looks fake, theatrical, and yet a man has metaphorically bared his soul.

Carver’s characters, like Anderson’s, become familiar to us after a while. The impact of the stories on the readers proceeds largely by accumulation. Hence the real difference between a story read in a magazine and a collection. When told that his characters are inarticulate and drab, Carver answered: “I AM one of these confused, befuddled people. I come from people like that, those are the people I’ve worked with and earned my living beside, for years.”10 This is the way Anderson spoke over and over again. Here is one example: “In my stories I simply stayed at home. among my own people, wherever I happened to be, people in my own street.” (letter to G. Freitag, Aug. 7, 1938). It is the Whitmanian stance, the writer claiming his brotherhood with all men and women. Reading Carver after Anderson, one recognizes, beyond the lack of words, the hopeless gestures of defeat (in “Viewfinder” as in many Winesburg stories ), the “kick” to be got out of voyeurism ( it is duplicated in “The Idea”), the urge to identify with others (“‘Neighbors”). The fear that so many characters experience feeds on an eerie sense of possession or projection: in “Fat,” a young waitress feels she is swelling after serving an obese customer and she takes it as an omen of change in her life. Nothing else is said. How characters react to a loss or a betrayal is a recurrent subject of Carver’s stories. It is true that, as in Anderson, they are basically passive, forever drifting, trying to escape their “unbearable selves.”11 Even change is often accidental. The stories do not always resolve in epiphanies. Mystery predominates over revelation–for both character and reader.

Anderson’s losers feel that they have missed “something,” bypassed creative or emotional possibilities. With Carver, the loss is related to a broken marriage in an astonishing number of cases. Men try to face being thrown out or abandoned or betrayed. They cope with realities like children, joblessness, excessive drinking, and the fear of death. William Gass observes the return of the “tough guy” and describes the style of Carver and some contemporaries as “soft tough,”12 which makes sense and contrasts with what Virginia Woolf called Anderson’s “shell-lessness.”13

Beyond this, Carver and Anderson express forms of nostalgia in which women play a crucial role. In Carver, the female characters are not stronger or more admirable than the men. Nobody knows what love is (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”), but the acute pain of loss is caused by their women’s defection. Anderson, the author of Perhaps Women, turns out to have a most conventional view of gender roles, as has been shown in particular by William V. Miller.14 Anderson sees women as entirely different, therefore stronger (they are not made ‘impotent’ by the machines); they are the muses of the (male only) artists, sometimes the agents of sexual repression (all those frigid silent wives or frustrated mothers) and of material ambition. In “The Egg,” after all, the father’s crazy scheme has been due only to his wife’s prodding him to get on in life. In “Two Lovers” John Wescott can find no better simile to describe his joy when the girl he had wanted said “yes” than to compare her to a car he also coveted. We cannot be sure Anderson is ironic here. Carver has a story (“What Is It?” or “Are These Actual Miles?”) in which the husband practically prostitutes his wife in order to get a car sold. When she returns, she calls him “son of a bitch,” yet she seems to have acquiesced to the role. Critic Vivian Gornick has said that, as a woman, she feels manipulated by Carver, for nothing establishes the previous happiness of the couples he shows in the process of breaking up. I agree with her in this and when she suspects that Carver was aware of it but wrote with a “wistful longing for an ideal tender connection that never was, and never can be.”15 It is true that, after all, the ideals of manhood and of womanhood have not changed that much from Hemingway to Carver or to Richard Ford or Andre Dubus, although the latter are not sexists but, as Gornick says, “tenderhearted men.” These authors , like Anderson, are romantics of a kind that is irritating to female readers. Anderson, at least, mourned his characters’ inability to mature.

But in their search for form and through different experiments, the two writers also share an attempt to wrest as much as possible from contemporary idioms and the rhythms of the vernacular, a struggle to work by way of indirection, although Carver has not had to fight the same battles. The narrator of Winesburg, Ohio kept calling for a poet (“it needs a poet there…”), but Anderson wrote poetry that was inferior to his prose. Carver was a poet, felt the kinship between poem and short story, but could not venture into longer writings, where Anderson excelled several times. Anderson’s voice comes from his own thematic and aesthetic appropriation of the grotesque, which is characterized by tenderness. By comparison, Carver’s voice is harsher. Can we even speak of a “voice” of his? I am not so sure, as he hides so much behind the surfaces of his characters’ words. He has a distinctive style rather than a voice. The more open-ended his stories, the more provocative for the imagination. When, in his later period, Carver felt more “positive” he found some stories “unfinished” and reworked them, injecting some optimism into them. A good instance is “The Bath,” taken up again and continued in “A Small Good Thing.” Whereas the first version is rich in tension, suspense, fear of the loss of a child, the second makes the story pathetic and more conventional with the long wait in the hospital and the moral regeneration of the baker. Several stories in his last collection, Cathedral, are longer and more “affirmative.” At the same time, Carver said: “I’m more sure of my voice. I really know what I have to do,”16 he was losing in sharpness and singularity. This is exactly what happened to Anderson whenever he felt less unsure–as in his novels of the ’20s–hence my thesis, which is that his best creative asset was an expression of the feeling of powerlessness, or at least doubt.17

This of course makes for a kind of writing that is limited in register, in diction even, and not as “plotless” as Anderson put it, but a kind of writing that is about what Tobias Wolff called “matters of life and death.”18 This is unappealing to some readers who prefer a more abstract, ironic, metafictional kind of writing. For Carver and Anderson are first and foremost tellers of stories, even if those are only glimpses, fragments. Their best work conforms to a superb definition of fiction: it has “the sense of mystery” and ‘”the sense of manners” prescribed by Flannery O’Connor, whom Carver liked to quote.19 It is therefore a bit puzzling to see how violently Carver has been attacked by fellow writers like William Gass and John Barth.20 They accused him of lack of artistry and, by implication, of pandering to the taste of a semi-illiterate audience. No wonder Carver turned to Anderson, writing a poem to him in which he fused the memory of his small town youth and that of his early readings:

“Anderson, I thought of you when I loitered in front of the drug store this afternoon. Held onto my hat in the wind and looked down the street for my boyhood ……………………………………………………………………… … still this feeling of shame and loss …… I am here in the house. I want to try again. You, of all people, Anderson, can understand.”21

(Bruyère, who teaches American literature at the Universite Paris-VII, is the author of Sherwood Anderson: L’Impuissance Creatrice (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985).

Notes

  1. Another writer who is occasionally “Andersonian”is Charles Bukowski, for instance in “Loneliness.” That story’s title and the subtitle “Stories of the Buried Life” for the collection which includes it, South of No North (1978), are even literal quotations. Bukowski paid tribute to him in his poem “One for Sherwood Anderson,” Dangling in the Tournefortia, 1982.
  2. N. Algren, Chicago, City on the Make (1953), 1961 Afterword, McGraw Hill, 1983. Earlier on, Algren had gone too far, however, in saying “the novelist’s place has traditionally been on the side of the loser,” “Interview with Nelson Algren” by Bob Perlongo. It took place in 1957 and was published in Arizona Quarterly, Spring 1989, vol. 45.
  3. In Shortcuts, by moving the stories to a big city, Robert Altman deeply modifies them.
  4. Something Happened, the 1974 novel by Joseph Heller, is also the story of a man who feels weak and is always frightened.
  5. The Carver story is like a condensed version of Michels Butor’s La modification, 1957.
  6. W. Gass, “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” New York Times Book Review, Oct. 11, 1987.
  7. See T. Wolff, Introduction to Matters of Life and Death, Wampeter Press, 1983 and R. Ford, “What a Sea of Stories Taught Me,” New York Times Book Review, Oct. 21, 1990.
  8. See J. Biguenet, “Notes of a Disaffected Reader: the Origins of Minimalism,” Mississippi Review, 40-41, Winter 1985.
  9. There are other readings of the story. For instance, Marilynne Robinson’s: “This ending seems arbitrary, but it is not, if his leaving her is a violation of the way things should be, like the miserable business with the deer.” “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds,” The New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1988.
  10. Interview with Larry Mc Caffery and Linda Gergory in Mississippi Review, 40-41, Winter 1985.
  11. See H. Waldman, “The Unbearable Self. A Study of the Theme of Identity in Sherwood Anderson.” thèse de Doctorat, Université Paris VII, 1978.
  12. W. Gass , in article cited note 6.
  13. V. Woolf, “American Fiction,” ( 1925) The Moment and Other Essays, 1948.
  14. W.V. Miller, “Earth Mothers, Succubi and Other Ectoplastic Spirits: the Women in Anderson’s Short Stories,” MidAmerica (1974), reprinted in Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, David D. Anderson, ed., Boston, G.K. Hall, 1981.
  15. V. Gornick, “Tenderhearted Men: Lonesome, Sad and Blue,” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 16, 1990.
  16. Interview cited in note 10.
  17. See my book Sherwood Anderson L’impuissance créatrice, Paris, 1985.
  18. See above, note 7.
  19. See his essay “On Writing,” Mississippi Review 40/41, winter 1985.
  20. See J. Barth, “A Few Words About Minimalism,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 28, 1986, and, for a more detailed presentation of the adverse criticism on Carver, Understanding Raymond Carver by Arthur M. Saltzman, University of South Carolina Press, 1988, especially ch. 1.
  21. “Harley’s Swans” in When Water Comes Together With Other Water, New York: Random House, 1984, reprinted in The Winesburg Eagle13 (Summer 1988): 7. For an interesting, more general study of the short stories of these two writers, see Elizabeth Savery Taylor, “Sherwood Anderson’s Legacy to the American Short Story,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1989, ch. V.

Mr. Lankes Compliments Mr. Anderson

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By Welford D. Taylor

During the fourteen years of their association1, Sherwood Anderson and woodcut artist Julius John Lankes (1884-1960) exchanged frequent compliments on each other’s work. Anderson’s best known accolade is “Mr J. J. Lankes and His Woodcuts,” which he included in No Swank 2(1934). Lankes’ expressions of admiration are not so well known to the modern reader, primarily because his verbal praise is found mainly in unpublished correspondence. However, in the graphic realm, which in Lankes’s case is the more important, the artist’s regard for Anderson is rather voluminously expressed. Of the more than thirteen hundred designs recorded in his “Woodcut Record,” eleven are Anderson-related. By far the best known of these is the dust jacket/frontispiece illustration forPerhaps Women (1931)3. However, more specialized students might recognize two additional images, formerly published in the Winesburg Eagle4: (1) the distinctive book plate that Lankes designed for Anderson in 1929 and (2) “Carolina Village” (originally titled “Winesburg, Ohio”) on which he collaborated with Charles Burchfield.

Most of the other Anderson-inspired images have not been reproduced in a print medium; rather, they exist as proofs, pulled from the original woodblocks. Several months ago, I was able to acquire some Lankes materials long thought to be lost. Contained among them were three connected items bearing a unique connection to Anderson. The first was a manuscript page, written by Lankes, describing a humorous incident that had occurred during a trip he made to “Ripshin” in the autumn of 1930. Although he and Anderson had begun corresponding in late 1927, shortly after the latter had assumed owner-editorship of the Marion Democrat and the Smyth County News, this visit marked their initial meeting. Always curious about new places, especially those out of the mainstream, Lankes, as expected, pulled out his sketching pad. The anecdotal incident he describes occurred while he made a pencil drawing of a row of buildings in Troutdale, the tiny village on State Route 16 where the two-mile mountain road to “Ripshin” begins.

Also contained in the newly acquired materials was the very sketch. that Lankes was making when the incident occurred and, to round out the discovery, there was a finished woodcut print of the village street he had sketched. From his few surviving preliminary drawings, one may infer that Lankes drew his designs in considerable detail, often in the same dimensions that he intended for the woodblock itself. “Mountain Town–Troutdale, Va.” is no exception; however, the dimensions of the finished woodcut design are slightly larger than those of the drawing. The two states of the artistic process reproduced here tell us much of Lankes’ working methods. However, one must bear in mind that between the drawing and the finished proof, a woodblock had to be carved–and that the drawing design had to be cut in reverse on the block, as if a mirror image, in order for the proof to reflect the original design. Good as Lankes was at sketching his subjects, and at printing, perhaps his real genius lay in the actual intricate process of limning woodblocks.

As far as I know, none of the following three items has been published before. I hope that readers of the Eagle will enjoy them as much as I do.

(Taylor is James A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond; he and Charles E. Modlin are the editors of A Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson, to be published this year by the University of Georgia Press.)

Notes

  1. For a more complete discussion of the Anderson-Lankes relationship, see my “Two Dismounted Men: Sherwood Anderson and J.J. Lankes” in Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies, ed. Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1976, 224-34.
  2. The essay, accompanied by four examples of Lankes’ work, had originally appeared as “J.J. Lankes and His Woodcuts” in The Virginia Quarterly Review 7, 1 (January 1931): 18-27.
  3. The evolution of this design is traced in my “Sherwood Anderson’s Perhaps Women: The Story in Brief,” Midamerica 10 (1983): 110-14.
  4. See The Winesburg Eagle 4, 1 (November 1978):5, and 10, 1 (November 1984): 8.

A Sherwood Anderson Checklist 1995

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By Margaret Kulis

Current Listings

A. Books and Dissertations

1. Barks, Cathy. “The Second Act: American Autobiography and the Moderns.” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 1995.

2. Kutulas, Judy. The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

3. Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

4. Sun, Hong. “Myth and Reality in the Rural and Urban Worlds: A Survey of the Literary Landscape in American and Chinese Regional Literatures.” Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1995.

5. Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

B. Articles, Chapters, and Discussions

1. Anderson, David D. “The Durability of Winesburg, Ohio, Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 51-58.

2. _____. “Sherwood Anderson, Henry Blake Fuller, James T. Farrell, and the Midwestern City as Metaphor and Reality.” Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter 25 (Fall 1995): 16-21.

3. ______. “Sherwood Anderson’s Advice to Young Writers.” Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 25 (Summer 1995): 7-13.

4. Anderson, Sherwood. “Again a Father.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Winter 1995): 12.

5. _____. “Chance Rules Us All.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Summer 1995): 1.

6. Barranger, Helen Caudill. “Afterword.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Summer 1995): 1-3.

7. Baskin, Barbara. An audiobook review of Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. In Booklist 92 (15 September 1995): 184.

8. Campbell, Hilbert H. “Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe.” Resources for American Literary Study 21 (1995): 58-67.

9. Enniss, Stephen. A Review of A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson by Judy Jo Small. In The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Winter 1995): 11-12.

10. Foley, Barbara. “Jean Toomer’s Sparta.” American Literature 67 (December 1995): 747-776.

11. Greasley, Philip. “Sherwood Anderson’s Oral Tradition.” Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 9-16.

12. Harris, Richard C. “Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather: Fragments to Shore Against the Ruins.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Summer 1995): 9-12.

13. Hassler, Patricia. A Review of Dearest Wilding by Yvette Szekely Eastman. In Booklist 91 (July 1995): 1853.

14. Hurt, James. A Review of White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885-1925 by Christopher P. Wilson. In Modern Language Review 90 (January 1995): 161-2.

15. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community.” In Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, 194-215. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

16. Kulis, Margaret. “Sherwood Anderson Checklist: 1992-3.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Winter 1995): 8-11.

17. Lindsay, Clarence. “The Unrealized City in Sherwood Anderson’s Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men.“ Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 17-27.

18. Miller, Paul. “The Importance of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Queer’ Brother Earl.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Summer 1995): 3-8.

19. Miller, Paul. “Sherwood Anderson’s Creative Distortion of his Sister Stella’s Character in The Memoirs.” Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 40-50.

20. Modlin, Charles. “Sherwood Anderson’s Dreams.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Winter 1995): 4-8.

21. Needham, George. A Review of Pig Cookies and Other Stories by Alberto Rios. In Booklist 91 (1 May 1995): 1553.

22. Rideout, Walter B. “Dark Laughter Revisited.” The Winesburg Eagle 20 (Winter 1995): 1-4.

23. Small, Judy Jo. “Hemingway v. Anderson: The Final Rounds.” The Hemingway Review 14 (Spring 1995): 1-17.

24. Wixson, Douglas. “Sherwood Anderson and Midwestern Literary Radicalism in the 1930s.” Midwestern Miscellany23 (1995): 28-39.

Additional Listings

B. Articles, Chapters, and Discussions

1. Anderson, David D. “Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Midwestern Modernism.” Midamerica 20 (1994): 73-81.

Sherwood Anderson Dissertations, Theses, Research Papers 1924-1995

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By Ray Lewis White

Whatever Sherwood Anderson thought of the many students and teachers who wrote to ask him for books, autographs, advice, recommendations, and explanations, the author was fortunate that his life and his writings did attract the curiosity and the energy of numerous academic individuals. For without the enthusiastic teaching of Anderson’s fiction in classrooms from secondary school through graduate school and without the continuing scholarly debate over Anderson’s proper historical and critical whereabouts, even Winesburg, Ohio might have gone out of print and Anderson might have become only another once-promising Midwestern author, a name among others in lists of influences on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

But Anderson even before his death in 1941 became the subject of the graduate-school theses and dissertations that would form the basis of continuing analysis, biography, and bibliography. Anderson theses and dissertations frequently became published volumes (Fagin, Sutton, Hoffman, Mann, Taylor, Ingram, Curry, Fanning, Hilfer, Idema, and Bruyère, among others); and the early theses written by Dinsmoor, Davenport, and Kintner and the dissertations written by Sutton and Phillips even yet aid biographers in their discoveries. The critical judgments of Fagin, Hoffman, Hilton, and Thurston pioneered lengthy and thorough analyses; and the bibliographical thesis completed by Gozzi in 1947 actually founded secondary Anderson bibliography. Gozzi’s catalogue of Anderson publications in periodicals inspired (and formed much content in) the Sheehy / Lohf bibliography (1960), a book which led to the secondary bibliography of White (1977); the short-fiction guide by Small (1994); and the continuing lists of Anderson studies in The Winesburg Eagle. Thus I have compiled this new list of dissertations (for doctoral degrees), theses (for master’s degrees), and undergraduate honors and seminar essays (for bachelor’s degrees) that have found their way into permanent college and university collections and that are worthy of discovery and study by students of Anderson and American literature. I attempt here to correct errors in previous lists of Anderson studies (including errors in my own publications), and I think that this record of 227 entries at least doubles the number of dissertations, theses, and research papers hitherto enumerated.

  1. Aarnes, Jane. “Sexual Fulfillment in Anderson’s Women Characters: Theme and Variations.” Thesis, Bowling Green, 1963.
  2. Abrams, Ann. “Heightening Sensitivity to the Human Condition through Novels.” Thesis, San Diego State, 1984.
  3. Anderson, David Daniel. “Sherwood Anderson and the Meaning of the American Experience.” Dissertation, Michigan State, 1960.
  4. Anderson, Judith V. “The Egg versus the Machine in Sherwood Anderson’s “Triumph of the Egg.” thesis, Colorado State, 1967.
  5. Ardat, Ahmad Khalil. “A Linguistic Analysis of the Prose Styles of Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Gertrude Stein.” Dissertation, Miami (Ohio), 1978.
  6. Babbs, John E. “John O’Hara’s Assembly: Descendant of Winesburg, Ohio” thesis, Ohio State, 1962.
  7. Bade, Dennis Eugene. “Sherwood Anderson: The Machine and the Horse as Symbols.” Thesis, Emory, 1974.
  8. Banduk, Maria Lucia Alves. “A Translation of Three American Short Stories.” Thesis, Bucknell, 1991.
  9. Barillas, William David. “Place and Landscape in Midwestern American Literature.” Dissertation, Michigan State, 1994.
  10. Barks, Cathy W. “The Second Act: American Autobiography and the Moderns.” Dissertation, Maryland, 1995.
  11. Barringer, Bobby Dewayne, Jr. “‘From Boyd City to the Big City and Beyond’: Six Stories with a Critical Introduction.” Thesis, North Texas, 1993.
  12. Boing, Jessica. “Primitivism in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Thesis, North Carolina State, 1979.
  13. Bousquet, Elizabeth, Sister. “The Twain Tradition: Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane.” Thesis, Montreal, 1968.
  14. Brown, Sheila Goodman. “A Carnival of Fears: Affirmation in the Postmodern American Grotesque.” Dissertation, Florida State, 1992.
  15. Bruyère, Claire. “L’Oeuvre de Sherwood Anderson: Sentiment d’Impuissance et Création Littéraire.” Dissertation, Paris, 1982.
  16. Byrne, Mary Ellen Morris. “An Exploration of the Literary Relationship between Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner.” Dissertation, Temple, 1975.
  17. Carabine, Keith. “‘A Pretty Good Unity’: A Study of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time.” Dissertation, Yale, 1978.
  18. Carlson, G. Bert, Jr. “Sherwood Anderson’s Political Mind: The Activist Years.” Dissertation, Maryland, 1966.
  19. Carr, Edward F. “Sherwood Anderson, Champion of Women.” Thesis, Pittsburgh, 1946.
  20. Chung, Chenchun Peter. “Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction: A Study in Culture, Psychology, and Technique.” Dissertation, Hawaii, 1992.
  21. . Ciancio, Ralph A. “The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction, an Existential Theory.” Dissertation, Pittsburgh, 1964.
  22. Cochran, Virginia Ruth G. “Welcome to Winesburg: A Dramatic Reading of Two Stories from Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Ball State, 1965.
  23. Coker, Jeffrey W. “A Leftward Glance: The Depression Era Politics of Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Anderson.” Thesis, Southwest Texas, 1994.
  24. Cole, Janice Ellen. “Many Marriages: Sherwood Anderson’s Controversial Novel.” Dissertation, Michigan, 1965.
  25. Coonley, Donald E. “The Fall in Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, South Florida, 1969.
  26. Crist, Robert Lenhart. “Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter: Sources, Composition, and Reputation.” Dissertation, Chicago, 1966.
  27. Curry, Martha Mulroy. “The ‘Writer’s Book’ by Sherwood Anderson: A Critical Edition.” Dissertation, Loyola (Chicago), 1972.
  28. Davenport, Kenneth. “Sherwood Anderson: An Appreciation of His Life and Fiction.” Thesis, Fort Hays State, 1937.
  29. Davis, Dale W. “A Thematic Study of Winesburg, Ohio: The Conflict Between Material and Human Values.” Thesis, Oklahoma, 1963.
  30. DeFazio, Albert John. “A Reassessment of the Influence of Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein upon Ernest Hemingway.” Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic, 1985.
  31. Defoe, Jeanne A. “Sherwood Anderson’s Critical Theory and Literary Practice.” Thesis, Oklahoma State, 1968.
  32. Deich, Frances. “The Inversse Moralism of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Oregon, 1937.
  33. Dinsmoor, Mary Helen. “An Inquiry into the Life of Sherwood Anderson as Reflected in His Literary Works.” Thesis, Ohio Univ., 1939.
  34. Dorwart, Jack Hoff. “A Study of Dark-Light Imagery in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Washington (Seattle), 1977.
  35. Duffy, Donald D. “The Moral Codes of the Adolescents of Clemens, Anderson, and Salinger.” Thesis, Oklahoma State, 1963.
  36. Durham, John Edward. “The Critical Reception of the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Duke, 1956.
  37. Duty, Michael. “Two Views of the American Small Town: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.” Thesis, Midwestern, 1975.
  38. Eaton, Dallas B. “Truths and the Grotesques in Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, California State, 1973.
  39. Eden, Walter Anthony. “A Critical Approach to Autobiography: Techniques and Themes in Sherwood Anderson, Benedetto Croce, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Richard Wright.” Dissertation, New York Univ., 1975.
  40. Elston, Suzanne Poteet. “Garrison Keillor and American Literary Traditions.” Thesis, North Texas, 1988.
  41. English, James Wilson. “A Limiting of Perspective.” Thesis, Virginia, 1981.
  42. Enniss, Stephen C. “Alienation and Affirmation: Sherwood Anderson and the Good Life.” Thesis, Georgia, 1987.
  43. Erickson, Beverly A. “Syntactic Patterms in the Writing of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.” Thesis, San Diego State, 1964.
  44. Eschelmüller, Valerie. “Sherwood Anderson: Versuch einer Kritischen Betrachtung Seines Prosawerkes.” Dissertation, Vienna, 1955.
  45. Esplugas, Celia. “Female Sexual Encounters in Works by Sherwood Anderson and Manuel Puig and Existential Themes and Literary Techniques in Sherwood Anderson’s and Manuel Puig’s Works.” Dissertation, Toledo, 1981.
  46. Evans, Deborah Marie. “Anderson’s Winesburg, Jewett’s Pointed Firs, and the Creation of a New Genre.” Thesis, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), 1991.
  47. Fagin, Nathan Bryllion. “The Phenomenon of Sherwood Anderson: A Study in Contemporary American Life and Letters.” Thesis, George Washington, 1924.
  48. Fanning, Michael Wilson. “France and Sherwood Anderson.” Dissertation, Arkansas, 1971.
  49. Feldman, Eugene. “The Isolation of the Individual as Seen by Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Columbia, 1947.
  50. Ferres, John H. “The Right Place and the Right People: Sherwood Anderson’s Search for Salvation.” Dissertation, Louisiana State, 1959.
  51. Finkel, Jan Monroe. “Techniques of Portraying the Grotesque Character in Selected Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, and Joseph Heller.” Dissertation, Indiana, 1973.
  52. Finley, Mary Sue. “Leaves of Autumn: Sherwood Anderson and the Season of Epiphany.” Thesis, Houston, 1973.
  53. Finnegan, Michael John. “The Beautiful and the Grotesque: An Evaluation of Sherwood Anderson’s Short Fiction Craftsmanship.” Dissertation, Rhode Island, 1982.
  54. Fioravanti, Joseph A. “A Comparative Study of the Grotesques in Sherwood Anderson and Hawthorne.” Thesis, New York, 1952.
  55. Frame, Gary A. “William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson: A Study of a Literary Relationship.” Thesis, British Columbia (Canada), 1968.
  56. Gage, Barbara Murel. “Correspondence: Sherwood Anderson and Benjamin W. Huebsch, 1918-1925.” Thesis, George Washington, 1968.
  57. Gavaldon, Loraine. “A Definition of Tragedy as Found in the Works of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, California State (Sacramento), 1960.
  58. Gentile, James Michael. “Sherwood Anderson and the Rewriting of American History.” Dissertation, Columbia, 1992.
  59. Gilman, Owen W. “Sherwood Anderson: Marriage and the Artist.” Thesis, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), 1973.
  60. Glaberson, Eric Abraham. “Historical Humanism in the Work of Two New York Intellectuals: Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin.” Dissertation, New York Univ., 1982.
  61. Göbel, Walter. “Sherwood Anderson: Ästhetizimus als Kulturphilosophie.” Dissertation, Heidelberg, 1982.
  62. Gokcen, Nilsen. “Societal Fragmentation and Problems of Communication in Sherwood Anderson’s Major Fiction.” Dissertation, Kent State, 1994.
  63. Goldman, Irene Carolyn. “Captains of Industry and Their Mates: A New Look at the American Business Novel from Howells to Dreiser.” Dissertation, Boston, 1986.
  64. Goodson, Rita Annette. “Influences of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio on Jean Toomer’s Writing of Cane.” Thesis, Iowa State, 1974.
  65. Gottschall, Marcia Petty. “A Key to Isolation in the Fiction of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Texas Tech, 1970.
  66. Gozzi, Raymond Dante. “A Descriptive Bibliography of Sherwood Anderson’s Contributions to Periodicals.” Thesis, Columbia, 1947.
  67. Grant, Jean B. “The Experimental Novel.” Undergraduate Essay, Catawba, 1975.
  68. Greasley, Philip Alan. “American Vernacular Poetry: Studies in Whitman, Sandburg, Anderson, Masters, and Lindsay.” Dissertation, Michigan State, 1975.
  69. Greenough, Sarah Eden. “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds.” Dissertation, New Mexico, 1984.
  70. Gridley, Roy Elliott. “Sherwood Anderson: A Study in the Creation of Fiction.” Thesis, Brown, 1959.
  71. Griffith, Malcolm Anstett. “The Grotesque in American Fiction.” Dissertation, Ohio State, 1966.
  72. Gronna, Anne T. M. “Analysis of Two Stories by Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Iowa State, 1949.
  73. Grosch, Anthony Richard. “Chicago Novels: An Introduction for Teachers.” Dissertation, Northwestern, 1979.
  74. Gross, Gregory Walter. “Epiphany in James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Wolfe.” Undergraduate Essay, Tulane, 1986.
  75. Guo, Qing. “The Perception of a Self: A Comparison of In Our Time and Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Clark, 1990.
  76. Haggart, Marjory Archer. “Naturalism in Selected Titles of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson.” Undergraduate Essay, North Dakota State, 1964.
  77. Hampton, Wade Gorrell. “The Idealization and Imitation of Animals in Sherwood Anderson’s Fiction.’ Thesis, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), 1981.
  78. Hanley, Richard Eugene. “Place to Place: A Study of the Movement between the City and Country in Selected Twentieth-Century American Fiction.” Dissertation, New York (Binghamton), 1981.
  79. Harper, Lawrence S. “Three Essays: Toward a Singular ‘They’; Theme and Style in Sherwood Anderson’s ‘The Untold Lie’; Feminist Perspectives in Henry James’ The Bostonians.” Thesis, Brigham Young, 1986.
  80. Hart, Robert Charles. “Writers on Writing: The Opinions of Six Modern American Novelists on the Craft of Fiction.” Dissertation, Northwestern, 1954.
  81. Harvey, Cathy Chance. “Lyle Saxon: A Portrait in Letters, 1917-1945.” Dissertation, Tulane, 1980.
  82. Harvey, Cyrus I. “Sherwood Anderson’s Natural History of Winesburg.” Undergraduate Essay, Harvard, 1948.
  83. Haught, Viva Elizabeth. “The Influence of Walt Whitman on Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg.” Thesis, Duke, 1936.
  84. Haynes, Aldemeda S. “Small Town Life in the Writings of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis. George Peabody, 19467.
  85. Hickerson, Jerry H. “The Critical Reputation of Sherwood Anderson since His Death.” Thesis, Kent State, 1968.
  86. Higgs, Robert Jackson. “Sports and the Athlete in the Work of Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Thesis, Tennessee, 1964.
  87. Hilfer, Anthony Channell. “The Revolt from the Village in American Literature, 1915-1930.” Dissertation, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), 1963.
  88. Hill, Jean Marie. “Sherwood Anderson: Man Lives Alone.” Thesis, Nebraska (Omaha), 1964.
  89. Hiller, Barbara Anne. “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Radford, 1975.
  90. Hilton, Earl Raymond. “The Purpose and Method of Sherwood Anderson.” Dissertation, Minnesota, 1950.
  91. Hipkiss, Robert Arthur. “The Values of Expatriation for the Major American Novelists, 1914-1941.” Dissertation, California (Los Angeles), 1966.
  92. Hoffman, Frederick John. “Freudianism: A Study of Influences and Reactions, Especially as Revealed in the Fiction of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, and Waldo Frank.” Dissertation, Ohio State, 1943.
  93. Holleran, Thomas R. “An Inquiry into Freudian Concepts in Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter.” Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth, 1950.
  94. Houston, James Dudley. “Three Varieties of Grotesquerie in Twentieth Century American Fiction: A Study of Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Stanford, 1962.
  95. Hughes, Donald F. “A study of Mysticism int he Writings of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis Syracuse, 1950
  96. Hughes, Robert Lee. “The Flight and the Search: The Quest for Creativity in the Novels of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Oklahoma, 1956.
  97. Humphries, David Marshall. “Winesburg, Ohio: The Struggle for Dignity.” Thesis, Bucknell, 1969.
  98. Hunker, M. Beth Sterner. “Gertrude Stein: A Rationale and Content for an Introduction to the Aesthetics of Modernism.” Dissertation, Ohio State, 1980.
  99. Idema, Henry, III. “A Psychoanalytic Theory of Secularization in Three Novelists: Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Dissertation, Chicago, 1987.
  100. Ingram, Forrest L. “Representative Twentieth Century Short Story Cycles: Studies in a Literary Genre.” Dissertation, Southern California, 1967.
  101. Jackson, James Allan. “Breaking through the Walls: The Use of Touch in Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, South Florida, 1988.
  102. Jackson, Kenny. “A Critical Bibliography of Novels Written about Chicago: 1900-1948.” Thesis, Northwestern, 1950.
  103. Jarrett, Blanche Hargrove. “Sherwood Anderson: Poet and Mystic.” Thesis, North Carolina State, 1984.
  104. Johnson, JoAnn. “The Search for a New Society for Old Visions: A Comparison of the Grotesque in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio with the Grotesque in Maxwell Bodenheim’s Novels.” Thesis, Kansas, 1963.
  105. Kanno, Keiko. “Tragic Dimensions in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, DePaul, 1979.
  106. Kennedy, John W. “‘The Backward View of Life’: The Initiation Theme of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Ohio State, 1986.
  107. Kermane, Bruce N. “Excessive Truth: Sherwood Anderson and the American Grotesque.” Dissertation, Sussex, 1980.
  108. King, Kathleen M. “Gossip: Right Here in River City.” Dissertation, Nebraska (Lincoln), 1984.
  109. Kintner, Evelyn. “Sherwood Anderson-Small Town Man, A Study of the Growth, Revolt, and Reconciliation of a Small Town Man.” Thesis, Bowling Green, 1942.
  110. Kirk, Gene Conrad. “The Short Fiction of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Western Illinois, 1966.
  111. Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. “American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: The Latter’s Acceptance of the Exceptional.” Dissertation, North Texas, 1994.
  112. Kisner, Madeleine, Sister. “Color in the Worlds and Works of Poe, Hawthorne, Crane, Anderson, and Welty.” Dissertation, Michigan, 1975.
  113. Klein, Alfons. “Figurenkonzeption und Erzaehlform in den Kurzgeschichten Sherwood Andersons.” Dissertation, Göttingen, 1978.
  114. Klein, Marie Annette. “The Stalled Traveller: A New Approach to the Full-Length Works of Sherwood Anderson.” Dissertation, Illinois, 1973.
  115. Klimczak, Robert Louis. “Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter: A Reconsideration.” Thesis, Alaska (Anchorage), 1992.
  116. Kores, Maryjo A. “The Search for Personal Identity and Meaning in Sister Carrie, Winesburg, Ohio, and the Novels of Herbert Gold.” Thesis, Ohio State, 1960.
  117. Kraft, Robert George. “Sherwood Anderson, Bisexual Bard: Some Chapters in a Literary Biography.” Dissertation, Washington (Seattle), 1969.
  118. Larson, Thomas W. “Culture as Social Process in Fiction of the Left: Michael Gold, Richard Wright, and Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, California (San Diego), 1987.
  119. Lemmon, Dallas Marion, Jr. “The Rovelle, or the Novel of Interrelated Stories: M. Lermontov, G. Keller, S. Anderson.” Dissertation, Indiana, 1970.
  120. Lenox, Winfield Scott. “The Significance of Sherwood Anderson’s Poetry.” Thesis, Loyola (Chicago), 1961.
  121. Lewin, Lois S. “Social Theory in the Work of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Pittsburgh, 1960.
  122. Lewis, Glen E. “The Treatment of the Negro in the Works of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1968.
  123. Lewis, Jane Karen. “Sherwood Anderson’s Concept of Art and the Artist: Its Influence on the Style and Form of His Novels.” Thesis, Texas (Austin), 1963.
  124. Llewellyn, Dara Virginia. “Short Story Boundaries.” Dissertation, Iowa, 1992.
  125. Lockford, Joyce Claire. “Sherwood Anderson and the Great Adventure: His Subjective Interpretation of Human Reality.” Thesis, Utah, 1959.
  126. Love, Glen A. “Sherwood Anderson’s American Pastoral.” Dissertation, Washington (Seattle), 1964.
  127. Lowery, Burling Hunt. “A Study of Sherwood Anderson’s Short Stories.” Thesis, Cornell, 1946.
  128. Lu, Cheng-Hong. “The Art and Unity of Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Northeast Missouri, 1974.
  129. Lundkvist, Artur. “Tre Amerikaner: Dreiser, Lewis, Anderson.” Thesis, Stockholm, 1939.
  130. Luscher, Robert Michael. “American Regional Short Story Sequences.” Dissertation, Duke, 1984.
  131. MacPherson, Olive Beatrice. “The Romantic Natauralism of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Boston, 1938.
  132. Madsen, Paula K. “The Evolution of Sherwood Anderson’s Thought.” Undergraduate Essay, Western Washington, 1970.
  133. Maekawa, Reiko. “Sherwood Anderson: A Critical Study of His Early Writings (1909-1921).” Thesis, Case Western Reserve, 1981.
  134. Mann, Susan Garland. “A Bibliographic and Generic Study of the Short Story Cycle: Essays on Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, In Our Time, Pastures of Heaven, and Go Down, Moses.” Dissertation, Miami (Ohio), 1984.
  135. Marshall, Lucille May. “The Critical Reception of Sherwood Anderson’s Fiction.” Thesis, Wyoming, 1960.
  136. Mayers, Oswald Joseph. “D. H. Lawrence Compared: Essays on His Literary Affinities with Hawthorne, Anderson, and Hemingway.” Dissertation, Oregon, 1981.
  137. McCabe, Tracy Graham, “Resisting Primitivism: Race, Gender, and Power in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.” Dissertation, Wisconsin, 1994.
  138. McCann, Michael James. “Symbolic Imagery in the Fiction of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Queen’s (Canada), 1982.
  139. McCarty, Rebekah Gray. “Oral Tradition in the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Angelo State (TX), 1993.
  140. McCullough, Ann Catherine. “A History of B. W. Huebsch, Publisher.” Dissertation, Wisconsin (Madison), 1979.
  141. McDermott, Darrelyn. “Winesburg, Ohio: A Study in Sterility and Loneliness.” Thesis, Eastern Washington, 1992.
  142. McIntyre, Ralph Elwood. “The Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Columbia, 1949.
  143. McKenna, Irene. “The Grotesque in the Early Novels of Sherwood Anderson and Luigi Pirandello.” Dissertation, California (Los Angeles), 1978.
  144. McNeely, Darrell W. “Jean Toomer’s Cane and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Black Reaction to the Literary Conventions of the Twenties.” Dissertation, Nebraska, 1974.
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  177. Reid, Tammy. “Eden and Utopia: The Theme of American Innocence in Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White and Winesburg, Ohio.” Thesis, Eastern Washington, 1971.
  178. Renalds, Brenda H. “Sherwood Anderson: Dramatist.” Thesis, Richmond, 1967.
  179. Reser, James A. “Sherwood Anderson: Country Newspaper Editor-Owner-Publisher.” Thesis, East Tennessee, 1964.
  180. Rhinesmith, Susan Clary. “Artistry and Form in Sherwood Anderson’s Short Stories-1914-1926.” Thesis, Stanford, 1964.
  181. Riedell, Karyn Lea. “The Struggle Toward Androgyny: A Study of Selected American Writers.” Dissertation, Arizona State, 1984.
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  184. Rogers, Albert Alan. “The Small Town in American Literature: A Study of the Small Town in America as Illustrated Particularly by the Stories of Sherwood Anderson.” Thesis, Auburn, 1931.
  185. Rogers, Douglas Gerson. “A Critical Edition of Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages.” Dissertation, Chicago, 1982.
  186. Rothweiler, Robert Liedel. “Ideology and Four Radical Novelists: The Response to Communism of Dreiser, Anderson, Dos Passos, and Farrell.” Dissertation, Washington (St. Louis), 1960.
  187. Sabukewicz, Charles J., Jr. “A Study of Sherwood Anderson’s Use of Myth in Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White.” Thesis, Rhode Island, 1965.
  188. Sanderson, Arthur Marshall. “Sherwood Anderson’s Philosophy of Life as Shown by the Actions of Characters in His Novels.” Thesis, Montana State, 1948.
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  190. Schorr, Mark. “Sherwood Anderson’s Imagination: History and Fiction.” Dissertation, Harvard, 1974.
  191. Sebastian, Dillard Floyd, Jr. “Sherwood Anderson’s Theory of Art.” Dissertation, Louisiana State, 1972.
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  193. Shawver, Jurgen Michael. “Sexuality and Human Development in Winesburg, Ohio.” Dissertation, Nebraska (Lincoln), 1978.
  194. Shea, Jerome Paul. “Sherwood Anderson, Charles Burchfield, and the American Small Town.” Dissertation, New Mexico, 1975.
  195. Shelton, Kay Trevathan. “Sherwood Anderson: Sexist as Artist.” Thesis, Southern Methodist, 1974.
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Famous Writer, Turned Country Paper Editor, Boosts the Town Band

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Introduction

In the late 1970s or early 1980s, someone in the Chamber of Commerce office in Marion, Virginia, called me to say that they had heard from an individual in Olathe, Colorado, who had a copper plate that had some connection with Sherwood Anderson. They gave me the name and phone number of the individual, and I called to inquire.

The gentleman told me he had found a metal plate with printing type on it in a hole in the barnyard of a farm he had bought near Olathe. He stuck the object between a couple of boards in the barn where it stayed for a few years, before he got around to trying to identify it. He took it to a newspaper office in Olathe. Someone there was able to make out some of the writing and told him it was about someone named Sherwood Anderson in Marion, Virginia. He then got in touch with the Marion Chamber of Commerce to help make contact with someone who might be interested. He asked if we might be interested in it. I asked him what he would take for it. He responded that he would take $60 for it and would mail it as soon as he received a check.

I contacted one or two of the officers of the Smyth County Historical Society and Museum, Inc., and they agreed that the Society should buy it. They provided a check to me and I mailed it to Colorado.

When the metal plate arrived, I took it to Marshall Guy at Guy Brothers Printing. He recognized it as a plate prepared to print a large sheet. He said he would mount it on a wooden frame and print a few sheets. A few days later he brought it to me, along with four printed sheets. He refused to take any payment, saying he did it for the Historical Society.

Some time later, Howard White, a member of the band, identified all the persons in the photograph at the top of the sheet. They are, from left to right, Frank Lieto, Trigg Scott, Gene White, Joe Stephenson, Howard White (partially obscured), Bill Robinson, Mack Wingo, Porter Snider, Ern Francis, Byron Groseclose, William Francis, Tack Jennings, Lynn Johnson, R.S. Sprinkle, Bill Sclater, Joe Lotario, Bill Snider, Arthur Slear, Casey Widener, Paul Thompson.

I do not know where this printed page originally appeared; however, the date was apparently 1928 because of the reference to Sherwood Anderson’s purchase “last fall” of the Marion newspapers. The first newspaper under Anderson’s ownership was the Marion Democrat, dated November 1, 1927. –Don Francis

No wonder the Marion band of Marion, Virginia, considers its troubles are over, says the Conn Music Center, Elkhart, Ind. Sherwood Anderson, who is reported to get a nickel a word for his short stories, is championing the band with a half to a column article every week in the Marion papers, which he recently bought.

Not only has this highly paid writer stirred up support in Marion, but many national figures have come to the support of the band.

Otto Kahn, international banker and donor to the Metropolitan Opera, has contributed $100. H.L. Mencken, “cussed” or praised by perhaps more people than any other writer in America, chipped in $12. So did Horace Liveright, well-known publisher. Alfred Knopf, another publisher of New York City, came across with $5, as did also Fred Black, Ford Motor Co., Detroit, and Brig. General Rosenbaum, Washington, D.C.

Sherwood Anderson says he is not an uplifter. He claims he took up the band cause from his own selfish desires. He says he likes a band. Band music just suits him. He would like to play the biggest horn in the band himself but lacks ability. He would like to be the drum major best of all, he confesses, but he doesn’t have the figure. It’s in his system, I guess, as his father used to play a cornet in the same town band with the late President Harding.

His First Story

“What does a band mean to a town?” Anderson asks in one of his first stories. “Better ask what is a town without a band? Life in a town goes on, just so. You know how it is. Merchants selling goods, lawyers fighting their cases, farmers coming into town to buy goods, spring, summer, fall, winter. People in their houses, women cooking, making beds. Life is dull enough.

“Days come. See, the men of the band have put on their uniforms and are coming up along the street. The big drum is booming, the horns going.

“Just suppose now, in our town, we are visited by some great man. Hurrah now, let’s give him a big day. It may be the governor of the state or some other dignitary. Our principal men are going to meet him down at the station. They have their best cars there, the biggest and best cars we have in town, all our leading citizens. And no band. Pshaw! What a frost.

“And what about Armistice Day and the Fourth of July?

“Or when the fair is on.

“Older men, staid citizens of a town, may be able to get along without a band, but what about the boys?

“When I was a boy my one great yearning was to play the biggest horn in the town band. I never made it.

There never was much music in me.

“Still and all, I’m not a jealous man. What I can’t have I don’t want to take away from the other fellow.

Fond of the Band

“I still like a band better than almost anything else in a town. Band music just suits me. There they come up the street. Lately I have only seen the Marion band in action a few times and then they didn’t have any drum major. I hope they get one again soon. I like to see the fellow in the big bearskin hat with his staff, stepping high and wide. I’d like to do it myself but I haven¹t got the figure for it.

“And how faithful and devoted the band members are. Then men of our Marion band, for example, go off to practice twice a week. Far from getting paid for their work they do it without pay. The members even pay dues to keep the band going.

“Recently, until these last few weeks, our Marion band has had a band leader who was paid a good salary because he was a good man. He was there to keep the boys up to snuff and would be there now but that he is sick.

Sacrifices of Band Men

“There are men in the Marion band who make a sacrifice every time they go out to play. Bear this in mind. When we want our band most, other towns, that haven’t any bands, would like one too. Our band gets offers to go all over the Southwest. Such offers almost always come when we need them here and they stay at home. Instead of going out and raking in money they stay here and give their services.

“And there are individual members of the band who make a sacrifice every time they go out to play. Do they kick? Not they.

“The boys of the band like their band, and so do we. Hurrah, here they come. Music floating on the breeze. every heart jumping. Life. Music. Zipp.

“We like that.

“The people of Marion owe it to their band to give it the heartiest kind of support. Get back of them. When they need a little money to keep going, shell out. A good band is the best investment a town can make.”

Join the Glory List

“Join the Glory List,” Sherwood Anderson headlines another story, and continues. “The Marion Publishing Company doesn’t intend to become a crusader. You know how city papers are. Well, we make no pretensions of being a big city paper. We are just a little old country weekly, that’s what we are.

“Still and all, as Mr. Ring Lardner is so fond of saying, we do not want the big city papers to hang it all over our eyes. City papers are always getting up a crusade for some good cause. They uplift this one or that one. Sometimes whole sections of society get uplifted like that. It’s wonderful.

“We aren’t, however, quite so ambitious. Up to date we have taken up but one cause and that is the Marion band. It may be the only one we ever will take up. And we are not doing that out of any altruistic purpose. It’s just because we like to hear the band play. We like to see them parade. When a big day comes, we like to see them put on their uniforms and come blowing their head off up Main street.

“Flags flying, everyone feeling fine. Life is drab enough on ordinary days. We have never found any way to be a canary bird ourselves.

Summer Night Concerts

“What we want is to see the band boys have a little money in the treasury. We want band concerts on summer nights.

“O, hearts of gold, who will put up $5.00 a year over a period of five years to get and keep our band in bang-up financial condition? We are making this appeal not only to Marionites but to all people in the surrounding country who read this paper and who like to come to our town when there is something stirring, or on summer nights to hear the band play.

“The King of England, President of France, President of the United States, Senators, Politicians, Millionaires, Rich Authors, Poor Ones, Farmers, Merchants, Anyone welcome.

“If you do not want to sign up for more than one year or cannot give $5.00, do not let that stop you.

“JOIN THE GLORY LIST.”

Spirit of the Band

Anderson says he would like to be the drum major in the band but doesn’t have the figure. Well, he may be a bit stiff but we’ll vote for him, anyway. He catches the spirit of the parading band. That’s what it takes to be a drum major.

“The band represents the town on its gay days,” he says. “When the fair comes, when there is a celebration, Fourth of July, any kind of a jamboree when every citizen becomes a boy again, then a good band, stepping gaily out, the drums beating, flags flying–what is a town without a good band?

“You cannot have a good band in debt. You cannot expect the boys to blow gaily, step out with real gusto, when they are in debt. To have a good band requires sticking to it. What can you expect when the boys have to come to band meeting and plunk down a dollar just for the privilege of working to be good when we want them good?

“The boys got a little discouraged. Their leader got sick. A lot of them are working boys. They got a little in debt. This paper is no uplift paper. It is just a good, little old country paper. But we like a band. We began writing about the Marion band in our paper.

“Well, don’t you worry about old Marion. We will rake in many a five-dollar bill for the boys.”

Viewpoint of the Band Men

Few have gotten the viewpoint of the small town band as has Sherwood Anderson. He has learned from the band men what they are up against. He also appreciates what the band really means to any town.

“One of the first signs of the decay of a town is when it cannot get up enthusiasm to support a band. The Marion band needs support. Most people don’t know it.

“In order to keep themselves up to snuff the boys practice twice a week. They pay a dollar a month out of their own pockets. This isn’t fair. They should not be asked to do that. The money goes to pay rent for a hall in which to practice, and other incidental expenses.

“Who will pay the yearly dues for one band boy? This paper will receive it for them. Some of the boys have got behind in their dues. A good many of them work hard for their money. When they get behind they do not feel like coming around to practice and the band suffers.

Loyalty of the Band

“Only last Armistice Day our band had an offer to go to another town. They could have got $250 for the day. They stuck to Marion. They have always stuck. We ought to stick to them.

“There is soon to be a show put on in town a part of the proceeds of which go to the band. Support that when it comes along. If you feel like chipping in to pay some fellow’s dues for a year, we will be glad to hear from you.”

When the campaign has run its course, the Marion band will probably be completely outfitted with quadruple gold-plated horns and uniforms with gold braid three inches wide. Anyway, the people of Marion are assured of band concerts this summer and of having a snappy band to liven up all their gala days with music.