1928
Immerses himself in the business of newspaper publishing while contributing columns and editorials. Establishes a lending library in the office of his print shop. Embarks on two-week lecture tour in November. Meets Eleanor Copenhaver, daughter of close friends from Marion, a social worker on the staff of the YWCA recently returned from an assignment in Europe. In December, at Anderson’s suggestion, Elizabeth goes to California to visit her family; shortly after arrival, receives letter from him saying that he would prefer it if she did not return. They do not divorce for several years but marriage effectively ends.
1929
Anderson’s son Bob moves in with him and assumes much responsibility for publishing newspapers. Anderson meets in Baltimore with writer V. F. Calverton, who hopes to become his biographer, but decides biographers should “wait till I am dead”; in March attends inauguration of Herbert Hoover. Hello Towns!, a collection of his newspaper writing, is published in April. Accompanies Eleanor to Elizabethton, Tennessee, where she has gone to observe labor unrest in the town’s textile mills; publishes “Elizabethton, Tennessee” in The Nation. Continues to correspond steadily with Eleanor although they see each other only sporadically. Works on novel whose working titles include “Another Man’s House” and “No God.” Beginning in June, spends six weeks in a cottage in Dykemans, New York, owned by Charles Bockler, a painter friend, and his wife; has brief affair with Bockler’s sister Mary Vernon Greer. Joins Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank, Fannie Hurst, and other writers on a committee supporting striking textile workers. Lectures at the University of Virginia. In November, reports that he has finished a draft of “No God.” Back in Chicago in December, has several telephone conversations with Tennessee but does not respond to her invitations to come see her. Travels to St. Petersburg, Florida, for Christmas where he works on “No God” but decides to abandon the novel. Learns that Tennessee has been found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills, possibly a suicide; does not attend her funeral.
1930
Travels in January to Savannah, where Eleanor joins him. Visits mills elsewhere in Georgia and South Carolina, and writes stories and articles about factory conditions. Anderson and Eleanor become lovers. Anderson goes to New Orleans and visits further factories, including Ford auto plant. Moved by death in March of D. H. Lawrence, whom he will praise for “the bringing back into prose art of the sensual.” Leaves New Orleans in April; has reunion with son John at Ripshin. Breaks with Otto Liveright and contracts with Anne Watkins as his new literary agent. Sees Eleanor as often as her peripatetic working life permits, in North Carolina, New Jersey, and (in October) at Ripshin. In Virginia in November, participates in public debate in Richmond on “Agrarianism versus Industrialism” and at mass meeting in Danville of striking cotton mill workers. Eleanor joins him in Marion for Christmas.
1931
Works on experimental “crazy book” that he soon abandons. Returns to Danville on January 13 to deliver speech to meeting of workers attempting to unionize; publishes account of his visit in The New Republic. Meets up as often as possible with Eleanor, whose work requires continual travel. Works on novel Beyond Desire. Lectures at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago in April. In New York in May sees Paul Rosenfeld, Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends; “deeply stirred” by Edmund Wilson’s article “Detroit Motors” in The New Republic. Wilson visits him in Marion in June and at Anderson’s request recommends books on Communism. Perhaps Women, a collection of stories and sketches centered on the varying effects of industrialism on men and women, published in September. Attends conference of southern writers at the University of Virginia in October; other participants include Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, Allen Tate, and William Faulkner. Debates Bertrand Russell on issues of child rearing in New York in November. Addresses New York meeting of National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in support of Theodore Dreiser, whom Kentucky officials have charged with criminal syndicalism.
1932
In January, hands over ownership of Marion Publishing Company to his son Bob. After lecturing in New York, works on Beyond Desire in Marion. Divorce from Elizabeth becomes final in February. Begins midwestern and western lecture tour in March; calls visit to San Joaquin Valley “the most delightful two days of my life.” Along with John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Waldo Frank, and others, signs manifesto calling for “a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers”; supports William Z. Foster’s presidential candidacy on the Communist ticket. As part of a delegation of writers also including Waldo Frank, attempts to see President Hoover to protest the calling out of armed forces to disperse marchers demanding army bonuses; meets with Hoover’s press secretary, publishes open letter to Hoover in The Nation. Sails to Amsterdam in August as a delegate to the World Congress Against War. Beyond Desire appears in September. With Arthur Barton, an actor he meets in New York in the fall, works on dramatic adaptation of Winesburg, Ohio.
1933
Works on two novels in succession, abandoning both. Death in the Woods and Other Stories is published in April, last book with Boni & Liveright whose business has failed. Work with Barton on Winesburg, Ohio at Ripshin comes to an impasse, and Anderson, unimpressed by Barton’s work, asks him to leave; continues revising script on his own. Marries Eleanor on July 6 at her parents’ home in Marion. Approached by Maxwell Perkins on behalf of Scribner’s, which becomes his publisher. Receives visit from Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace at Ripshin. Begins contributing political articles to The American Spectator and Today. Becomes enthusiastic supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Travels to West Virginia to report on condition of coal miners for Today. Continues to work on memoir “I Build My House.”
1934
Tours the South for Today, reporting on impact of New Deal programs. Dramatic adaptation of Winesburg, Ohio, revised by Jasper Deeter, opens in June at the Hedgerow Theatre, Deeter’s community theater in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania. In November and December makes motor tour with Eleanor through the Midwest to gather material for journalism; they have dinner on December 9 in St. Paul, Minnesota, with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who are touring America. No Swank, a short collection of articles including title profile of Henry Wallace, published in a limited edition by Centaur Press in December.
1935
Travels to Texas with Eleanor in January, making stops along the way in Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans; they stay in Corpus Christi and then Brownsville, making frequent visits across the Rio Grande to Matamoros, Mexico. Returns to New Orleans in February for reunion with Gertrude Stein, their last encounter. Works on novel “Brother Earl” (soon abandoned), based on his brother’s life. Puzzled America, collection of Today articles, published by Scribner’s in March. Accompanies Eleanor on trip through the South where she has a series of speaking engagements; they have brief visit with Eugene O’Neill in Sea Island, Georgia. Writes admiringly to Thomas Wolfe after reading Of Time and the River: “Some things I can write but you—you are a real novelist.” In May travels to Roanoke, Virginia, to observe for a few days (at the request of Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau) the conspiracy trial of members of a local bootlegging operation. Works on play They Shall Be Free. Returns to Roanoke for last days of trial and writes article on the case, published in Liberty; soon begins Kit Brandon, a novel on same subject. Reports on American Federation of Labor convention in Atlantic City in October. Immerses himself in the letters of Vincent van Gogh, which he says have become “a kind of Bible” to him.
1936
Lectures in Chicago in January. Drives with Eleanor and Mary Emmett, widow of friend Burton Emmett, on tour of the Southwest; Anderson and Eleanor have difficulty getting along with Mary and travel on without her. (The three will continue to be close, but with continuing frictions.) Anderson enjoys six-week stay in Tucson, Arizona. They drive back through Texas and arrive in New Orleans in late March for brief visit. Anderson works on play Man Has Hands and on autobiographical
narrative “Rudolph’s Book of Days” (which will become part of posthumously published Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, edited by Paul Rosenfeld). Spends a month with Eleanor in New York; sees many friends, including Paul Rosenfeld and Ben Hecht. Kit Brandon published; receives some strong reviews (including one by Alfred Kazin) but does not sell well. Visits Florida and North Carolina with Eleanor.
1937
Depressed and ill during January vacation in Texas; hospitalized with intestinal flu. Spends rest of winter at Ripshin. Writes radio play “Textiles,” accepted for CBS series “Land of Plenty” but not broadcast because series is canceled. During trips to New York in April and May, meets Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell. Works on novel “How Green the Grass.” Participates in writers’ conference at the University of Colorado in August; others present include John Peale Bishop, Evelyn Scott, and John Crowe Ransom. Visited at Ripshin by Thomas Wolfe. Plays: Winesburg and Others published in September. Abandons novel and works on memoirs. Again in New York from October to December, sees Thomas Wolfe and meets young admirer Edward Dahlberg; meets with William Faulkner at the latter’s request after Faulkner burns himself badly on a steampipe following heavy drinking. Friendship with Wolfe cools after Wolfe quarrels drunkenly with Eleanor at New York dinner party hosted by Anderson and then subsequently accosts Anderson with an angry tirade in a hotel lobby.
1938
Accompanies Eleanor to Chicago; when her work there is finished at the end of January, they travel south to Texas and then (with Mary Emmett and a friend) to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, Anderson and Eleanor go off to Acapulco; they return to Brownsville, Texas, in mid-March and go back to Marion in mid-April. In July Eleanor accepts administrative job with YWCA that will necessitate living in New York; Anderson is deeply opposed but recognizes the financial necessity of accepting in view of the diminished sales of his books. Works on novel “A Late Spring” and becomes depressed when it fails to develop properly. Eleanor goes to New York to begin her new job at the beginning of October, and Anderson joins her there several weeks later.
1939
Travels to Olivet College, Michigan, as writer in residence for the winter term. Rejoins Eleanor for a month in New York, then travels alone to New Orleans for several weeks before returning to Marion. Spends spring in New York; enjoys meeting Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal. Returns to Olivet in July for writers’ conference also attended by Katherine Anne Porter and Padraic Colum. Attends Lexington Trots harness races in Kentucky and writes about them for Esquire (“Here They Come”). Delivers lecture on “Man and His Imagination” at Princeton in October. Accompanies Eleanor on business trip to the West and Southwest, October-December. Meets John Steinbeck in San Francisco, visits migrant labor camp near Fresno, and in Los Angeles sees Anita Loos and her guest Aldous Huxley. Works on memoirs.
1940
In Washington in January meets with representatives of Alliance Book Corporation and Farm Security Administration who ask him to write the text for Home Town, a book on small towns illustrated with FSA-commissioned photographs. Settles with Eleanor at the Royalton Hotel in New York for the winter. Suffers long bout of flu. Returns to Virginia in May. Works intensively on memoirs. Attends Olivet writers’ conference where he meets Robert Penn Warren. Home Town published in October. Plans trip to South America.
1941
In New York City in January, works on his memoirs and practices his Spanish for planned South American trip with Eleanor. Travels home and then to Tampa, hoping without success to find a Spanish family willing to help him with his language skills. Returns to New York, ready for the voyage by way of Panama to Chile. Makes an agreement with Viking Press to purchase the rights to his works, except for Winesburg, Ohio and A Story Teller’s Story, for just under $2,000. At a party on February 27, inadvertently swallows a toothpick, stuck in a cocktail olive. Sails the next day, and begins to suffer from abdominal pain. On March 5, is taken by ambulance to Colon Hospital in Colon, Panama. Dies on March 8 of peritonitis. Eleanor returns with his body to Marion, where he is buried on March 26 at Round Hill Cemetery, under a grave marker designed by Wharton Esherick, bearing the motto, chosen long before by Anderson: “Life not death is the great adventure.”
Note on the Texts
* * *
This volume contains all of the story collections Sherwood Anderson published during his lifetime—Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933)—along with a selection of 15 stories he did not include in these books. The texts of Anderson’s story collections have been taken from the first printings of the first editions, with the exception of the text of Winesburg, Ohio, which incorporates a handful of corrections made in later printings. The texts of Anderson’s uncollected stories have been taken from a variety of sources, discussed below.
Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life. In his Memoirs—written late in life, and published posthumously—Anderson remembered finishing the interconnected stories of Winesburg, Ohio “in a few months, one following the other, a kind of joyous time for me, the words and ideas flowing freely, very little revision to be done.” In fact, the composition of Winesburg was neither so rapid nor so effortless. Anderson’s Winesburg manuscripts, now among his papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago, show considerable evidence of rewriting. He arranged and on more than one occasion rearranged the stories before submitting them for publication as a book. All told, he may have taken as long as two and a half years—from November 1915 to April 1918—to complete them.
Still, Anderson’s recollection of an intensely creative “few months” only mildly exaggerates the pace at which Winesburg came into being. He began, very probably, in November 1915, with “The Book of the Grotesque”—an introductory reverie which gave him a working title for the collection and an outline of its final form—and the story “Hands.” “‘Queer’” was probably finished in December 1915, because early in January Anderson learned that H. L. Mencken had decided not to publish it in The Smart Set. By November 1916, when Anderson wrote to Waldo Frank proposing that Frank publish some of the stories in Seven Arts, he reported he had written 15 of these “intensive studies of people in my home town, Clyde, Ohio,” out of the 25 stories in the published Winesburg (counting the parts of “Godliness” separately).
The order in which each of the stories was written—“one following the other,” as Anderson later remembered it—cannot be determined precisely. William L. Phillips, in “How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Winesburg, Ohio” (American Literature 23.1 [March 1951]: 7–30), argues that the scrap paper on which Anderson drafted the stories offers substantial evidence toward an understanding of their composition history. Details within the stories provide additional evidence: “The Philosopher,” “Death,” “Sophistication,” and “Departure” appear to have been among the last of the Winesburg stories to be written because they refer to scenes, incidents, and characters previously introduced.
Anderson began trying to publish stories from Winesburg in magazines almost immediately after he had begun the collection. Floyd Dell, coeditor of The Masses, was the first to print one, in February 1916, followed by Margaret Anderson at The Little Review and Waldo Frank at Seven Arts. The serial publication history of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio is given in more detail in the list below. Those stories that did not appear in magazines are marked with an asterisk (*):
The Book of the Grotesque: Masses 8 (February 1916): 17.
Hands: Masses 8 (March 1916): 5, 7.
Paper Pills: Little Review 3 (June–July 1916): 7–9 (as “The Philosopher”).
Mother: Seven Arts 1 (March 1917): 452–61.
*The Philosopher
*Nobody Knows
*Godliness (Parts I and II)
*Surrender (Part III)
*Terror (Part IV)
A Man of Ideas: Little Review 5 (June 1918): 22–28 (as “The Man of Ideas”).
*Adventure
*Respectability
The Thinker: Seven Arts 2 (September 1917): 584–97.
*Tandy
The Strength of God: Masses 8 (August 1916): 12–13.
*The Teacher
*Loneliness
An Awakening: Little Review 5 (December 1918): 13–21.
“Queer”: Seven Arts 1 (December 1916): 97–108.
The Untold Lie: Seven Arts 1 (January 1917): 215–21.
*Drink
*Death
*Sophistication
*Departure
The magazine texts of the Winesburg stories differ, usually in minor ways, from both the surviving manuscripts and the published book texts; “Hands” and “The Untold Lie” contain more substantial variation.
Anderson sent his publisher John Lane a copy of the collection in May or June 1918, but sales of Anderson’s previous books—Windy McPherson’s Son (1916), Marching Men (1917), and Mid-American Chants (1918)—had been disappointing, and Lane reportedly found the new work “too gloomy.” Anderson traveled to New York to find another publisher, and by December he had signed a contract with B. W. Huebsch. (Francis Hackett, literary editor of The New Republic, had done Anderson the favor of introducing the two.) Huebsch later claimed that the collection had been presented to him without a title and that he had suggested Winesburg, Ohio, but Anderson had referred to the book as Winesburg in his correspondence at least as early as April 1918; he may also have circulated it among publishers as The Book of the Grotesque. Huebsch suggested that Anderson work with the illustrator Harald Toksvig to produce a sketch map of Winesburg for the front endpaper.
Anderson read proofs of Winesburg, Ohio most probably in January 1919, and the book was published on May 8. It sold well enough to warrant six additional printings: in December 1919, January and December 1921, March 1922, March 1927 (as a Viking Press book, Huebsch having merged with the larger firm), and June 1931. The second of these printings contains nine corrections of typographical errors, and there are two further corrections in the fifth. These corrections may have been made at Anderson’s request: in August 1919, he had sent Huebsch a list of errors found in the first printing. (His list is not known to have survived.) Two other firms published Winesburg, Ohio during Anderson’s lifetime, both in 1922: Jonathan Cape, in London, and Boni & Liveright in New York (in their Modern Library series). Both of these firms borrowed the Huebsch printing plates rather than resetting the text. In 1925, a selection of stories from Winesburg was published as Hands, and Other Stories by Haldeman-Julius, in the Little Blue Book series, but Anderson was not involved in the preparation of this edition.