E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #85: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
by Ernie on 10/04/08 at 11:09 am
Number 85 on our top 100 countdown: Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919). This is a book that has fallen on hard times. Upon its debut, it was considered a bold and even shocking addition to the naturalist style in American letters. Anderson was hailed as a genius for his portraits of troubled, unstable, yearning small-town Americans, and it was thought that he was a “primitive” writer of the best sort, instinctual, raw, able to tap into the murky Freudian depths that run beneath the facade of daily life. He supported and heavily influenced four major American novelists, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thomas Wolff, and Faulkner, all of whom spurned and even ridiculed him (Hemingway’s second commercially published book, The Torrents of Spring, is a vicious parody of Anderson). Anderson created a myth about himself that seems to have stuck. According to his version of events, at age 36 he was suddenly stunned into silence while dictating a banal letter to his secretary at the paint manufacturing company where he worked. He suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown and simply walked off to the east. He described it as “escaping from his materialistic existence,” and this has made him a hero for generations of would-be writers who feel trapped in mundane but secure lives.
Anderson came to sit at the center of any consideration of twentieth-century American fiction, largely on the merits of the collection Winesburg, Ohio, a series of interconnected short stories that may by read as a novel. Then matters took a turn for the worse. Anderson was unable to repeat the success of his breakthrough collection (though some think the later Death in the Woods is actually his most accomplished collection). His proteges cruelly parodied the style he created. The great critic Lionel Trilling drubbed Winesburg, Ohio. Later, Susan Sontag managed to drive the last nail into Anderson’s coffin by saying “it’s okay to laugh at him again.” Irving Howe has attempted to restore Anderson’s reputation, but Winesburg, Ohio, once considered an American classic, continues to wallow in undeserved obscurity. Anderson set the trend for unusual, troubled characters, the “twisted apples,” and the hidden, dark drives that lurk behind the myths of “normal” life. His influence has been enormous, even if he is no longer fashionable. Perhaps he is ready for a comeback!
Jesse
Apr 13th, 2008
He is most certainly due for a comeback! Especially Death in the Woods, a cornerstone of any serious modern literature collection, as I’m sure your clients know.
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