Introduction

by Irving Howe

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old
when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these
stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson's small-town
"grotesques," I felt that he was opening for me new depths
of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which
nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the
small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found
myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wasted
love--was this the "real" America?--that Anderson sketched
in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to
offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.

Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as
a soldier, I spent my last week-end pass on a somewhat
quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town upon which
Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose, not
very different from most other American towns, and the few
of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson
seemed quite uninterested. This indifference would not have
surprised him; it certainly should not surprise anyone who
reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write literary
criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography
of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's
influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from
which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover.
Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous
sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in
stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There
was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least
with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which
he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried,
somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of
judgment Trilling had made with my still keen affection
for the best of Anderson's writings. By then, I had
read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished
than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place
in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a
gesture of thanks for the light--a glow of darkness,
you might say--that he had brought to me.

Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps
fearing I might have to surrender an admiration of
youth. (There are some writers one should never return
to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say
a few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I
have again fallen under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio,
again responded to the half-spoken desires, the
flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I
now have some changes