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Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

Winesburg, Ohio | The Triumph of the Egg | Horses and Men | Death in the Woods | uncollected stories More

Edited by Charles Baxter

“The creator of the modern American short story; the John the Baptist who prepared the way for (and influenced) writers as different as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Ray Bradbury. . . . One can hope that these collected stories will rekindle interest in his work.”—Michael Dirda, TLS

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Influences Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut
November 3, 2021

Audio Siri Hustvedt, Deborah Eisenberg, and other contemporary writers read ten stories by Sherwood Anderson
November 3, 2021

Story of the Week Sherwood Anderson, “The New Englander”
September 13, 2020

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Sherwood Anderson became a writer by a process of slow and irresistible rebellion. Breaking away from a two-decade career as advertising copywriter and small businessman, he reinvented himself as a modernist storyteller whose influence was foundational for modern American writing. Without Anderson’s example, the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, McCullers, Mailer, and Kerouac is almost unthinkable. In mapping the America he knew widely and intimately—an America of small towns, big-city boarding houses, racetracks, isolated farms—he opened up new regions of America’s inner life in stories that remain astonishing for their stylistic freedom, their emotional candor and sexual frankness, and the exactness of their observation.

Anderson wrote in many genres, but it was in the short story that he found his ideal form. This volume collects for the first time all the books of stories he published in his lifetime—Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933)—along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Taken together they offer powerful evidence of Anderson’s extraordinary capacity to illuminate what is hidden under the surface of seemingly ordinary lives and to give expression to private delusions and desires.

When Winesburg, Ohio appeared, Hart Crane wrote: “America should read this book on her knees. It constitutes an important chapter in the Bible of her consciousness.” Weaving memories of his small-town youth into a series of interrelated stories, Anderson realized a stunning collective portrait, a haunting, expressionist set of variations on themes of isolation, frustration, and encroaching obsession. It remains a central masterwork of American literature.

Anderson’s later collections are no less imbued with his intuitive sense of the shapes of lives as felt from the inside. In such stories as “I Want to Know Why,” “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” “The Man Who Became a Woman,” “An Ohio Pagan,” and “Brother Death,” he offers breathtaking insights, catching his characters unawares with deep empathy for their fragility and strangeness.

Charles Baxter, the editor of this volume, is the author of five novels, including The Feast of Love, a National Book Award finalist, five collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and two collections of essays on fiction. He teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and at the University of Minnesota.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Influences Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut
November 3, 2021

Audio Siri Hustvedt, Deborah Eisenberg, and other contemporary writers read ten stories by Sherwood Anderson
November 3, 2021

Story of the Week Sherwood Anderson, “The New Englander”
September 13, 2020

Story of the Week Sherwood Anderson, “Hands”
May 8, 2019

Story of the Week Sherwood Anderson, “Loneliness”
May 8, 2019
Table of Contents

Winesburg, Ohio
The Book of the Grotesque
Hands—concerning Wing Biddlebaum
Paper Pills—concerning Doctor Reefy
Mother—concerning Elizabeth Willard
The Philosopher—concerning Doctor Parcival
Nobody Knows—concerning Louise Trunnion
Godliness (Parts I and II)—concerning Jesse Bentley
Surrender (Part III)—concerning Louise Bentley
Terror (Part IV)—concerning David Hardy
A Man of Ideas—concerning Joe Welling
Adventure—concerning Alice Hindman
Respectability—concerning Wash Williams
The Thinker—concerning Seth Richmond
Tandy—concerning Tandy Hard
The Strength of God—concerning The Reverend Curtis Hartman
The Teacher—concerning Kate Swift
Loneliness—concerning Enoch Robinson
An Awakening—concerning Belle Carpenter
“Queer”—concerning Elmer Cowley
The Untold Lie—concerning Ray Pearson
Drink—concerning Tom Foster
Death—concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard
Sophistication—concerning Helen White
Departure—concerning George Willard

The Triumph of the Egg
Impressions in Clay by Tennessee Mitchell (photographs by Eugene Hutchinson)
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

Horses and Men
Foreword
Dreiser
I’m a Fool
The Triumph of a Modern
“Unused”
A Chicago Hamlet
The Man Who Became a Woman
Milk Bottles
The Sad Horn Blowers
The Man’s Story
An Ohio Pagan

Death in the Woods and Other Stories
Death in the Woods
The Return
There She Is—She Is Taking Her Bath
The Lost Novel
The Fight
Like a Queen
That Sophistication
In a Strange Town
These Mountaineers
A Sentimental Journey
A Jury Case
Another Wife
A Meeting South
The Flood
Why They Got Married
Brother Death

Uncollected Stories
Sister
The White Streak
Certain Things Last
Off Balance
I Get So I Can’t Go On
Mr. Joe’s Doctor
The Corn Planting
Feud
Harry Breaks Through
Mrs. Wife
Two Lovers
White Spot
Nobody Laughed
A Landed Proprietor
The Persistent Liar

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-204-3 900 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 235 Library of America Series

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