Introduction - Page 2

of response: a few of the stories
no longer haunt me as once they did, but the long story
"Godliness," which years ago I considered a failure, I
now see as a quaintly effective account of the way
religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can
become intertwined in American experience.

* * *

Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His
childhood and youth in Clyde, a town with perhaps three
thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of poverty, but
he also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial
American society. The country was then experiencing
what he would later call "a sudden and almost universal
turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our
modern life of machines." There were still people in
Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America
itself, the town lived by a mixture of diluted
Calvinism and a strong belief in "progress," Young
Sherwood, known as "Jobby"--the boy always ready to
work--showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that
Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a
"go-getter," And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago
in his early twenties, he worked in an advertising
agency where he proved adept at turning out copy. "I
create nothing, I boost, I boost," he said about
himself, even as, on the side, he was trying to write
short stories.

In 1904 Anderson married and three years later moved to
Elyria, a town forty miles west of Cleveland, where he
established a firm that sold paint. "I was going to be
a rich man.... Next year a bigger house; and after
that, presumably, a country estate." Later he would say
about his years in Elyria, "I was a good deal of a
Babbitt, but never completely one." Something drove him
to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers--a
need for self-expression? a wish to find a more
authentic kind of experience?--that would become a
recurrent motif in his fiction.

And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in
Anderson's life. Plainly put, he suffered a nervous
breakdown, though in his memoirs he would elevate this
into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the
sterility of commerce and turned to the rewards of
literature. Nor was this, I believe, merely a deception
on Anderson's part, since the breakdown painful as it
surely was, did help precipitate a basic change in his
life. At the age of 36, he left behind his business and
moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious
writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has
since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance."
Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated
spirit, and like many