From Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories
By 1921, Sherwood Anderson was very much aware of how completely his first two story collections—Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg—had subverted the conventions for writing short fiction. “The short story form has become among us very much what I call corrupt,” he told an interviewer.
Publishers of short stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots for short stories were found and about these plots our writers sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however, being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a snappy, entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an hour after it was read.
Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable to think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On the other hand, there were all about me human beings living their lives and in the process of doing so creating drama.
The revolution in literature during the 1920s also reflected a geographical shift in American society. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot all hailed from the Midwest, following in the footsteps of such veteran writers as Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. To Anderson, the changing attitudes in American literature were as much geographical as literary, a rejection of what he saw as the restrictive primness of aging New England institutions in favor of the expansive physicality of life in the wide open spaces out west.
Anderson continued to influence later writers from across the nation. “It was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio that set me free,” recalled Illinois native Ray Bradbury in his preface to the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles. “Sometime in my twenty-fourth year, I was stunned by its dozen characters living their lives on half-lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town. ‘Oh, Lord,’ I cried. ‘If I would write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that would be!’”
For the 150th anniversary of Anderson’s birth, we present one of his most acclaimed stories, “Death in the Woods,” which was published in The American Mercury 100 years ago this month. Our introduction to the story describes how, over a period of ten years, it grew from false starts and fragments into a classic included in countless anthologies.
