A Book Of Impressions
From American Life
In Tales And Poems:
The dumb man.
I want to know why.
Seeds.
The other woman ().
The egg.
Unlighted lamps.
Senility.
The man in the brown coat.
Brothers.
The door of the trap.
The new englander.
War.
Motherhood.
Out of nowhere into nothing.
The man with the trumpet.
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
Like Samuel Clemens, by whom, in fact, he was influenced, Sherwood Anderson has had an incalculable influence upon generations of American writers. The deceptively artless, unadorned, anecdotal Anderson voice has come to characterize, for many readers, the distinctive American voice — most recently reconstituted as Minimalism. Simple, often declarative sentences; "realistic" settings, characters, plots; a lack of interest in stylistic experimentation; an absence of philosophical exploration — this is the kind of fiction that many, or most, readers prefer, because it is so readily accessible. Except at its most brilliantly stylized, as in certain short fictions of Ernest Hemingway, the meanings and significance of the Anderson voice lie on the surface of narrative. Which is not to say that they are, or need be, superficial, as in Anderson's exemplary Winesburg, Ohio (1919), from which "The Strength of God" is taken, and certain of his much-anthologized short stories like "The Egg," "I Want to Know Why," and "Death in the Woods."
Anderson, born in southern Ohio of a nomadic family, became a writer in early middle age after a business career that seems to have pushed him into a nervous collapse. The author of a number of novels, including Windy McPherson's Son (1916) and Poor White (1920), Anderson most realized his vision as a writer of short stories. These are collected in The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933). But his masterpiece remains Winesburg, Ohio, that "Book of the Grotesque" sui generis.