Sherwood Anderson
An American Career

by John E. Bassett

Sherwood Anderson: An American Career is the first critical introduction to this important Midwestern and American writer in over a quarter century. While re- evaluating the accomplishments in Winesburg, Ohio and Anderson's other novels and short stories, it pays more attention to his non-fictional, auto- biographical, and journalistic writing than do previous studies. It draws on un- published manuscripts in the Newberry Library Anderson papers that shed new light on a prolific career, manuscripts such as "Talbott Whittingham" and "An Ohio Paper."

The book considers Anderson as a self- conscious Midwesterner who wanted to be a major writer but meanwhile was skeptical about "art" as an institution and industry. He wanted to be part of an American tradition and was attracted to eastern literary life but also saw eastern writing as more effete than what he believed came from a wider and cruder but more vital West.

Sherwood Anderson: An American Career traces these tensions in the author's career as well as his continual search for sources of a new vitality to replace what had been sapped, he felt, by mechanization, standardization, urbanization, and conformity. He found it successively in "the Negro," the female, and the mountaineer, but rarely if ever captured that supposed vitality in more than abstractions. This study also traces Anderson's continuing quest to author big works at the same time that his real strength lay in the image, the impression, the sketch, the tale, or the essay, vividly capturing feelings and impressions but rarely changes over time or complex social issues.

This book argues that what Anderson did well few have done better, and that in today's uncertainties that come from enormous advances in science and technology, political and religious up-heavals, demographic shifts, and unsettling ethical challenges, Anderson's poignant impressions of the lonely soul and displaced worker will take on new meanings and significance.

The study grows out of a strongly felt need that while fine scholars have added research-based knowledge about Ander- son, his life, and his works, he has been too long absent from critical discussion of American literature and from the bookshelf of the common reader.

LC 2005015407

ISBN 1-57591-102-7

Printed in the U.S.A.