Sherwood Anderson - Böcker

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SARA WHEELER'He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing' William FaulknerThis timeless cycle of short stories lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest. The central character is George Willard, a young reporter on the WINESBURG EAGLE to whom, one by one, the town's inhabitants confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. The town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson's special talent exposes the emotional undercurrants that bind its people together.

Anderson profoundly changed the American short story, transforming it from light, popular entertainment into literature of the highest quality. His art belonged as much to an oral as a written tradition, and, as this collection shows, the best of his stories echo the language and the pace of a man talking to his friends. They explore with penetrating compassion the isolation of the individual and capture the emotional undercurrents hidden beneath ordinary events.

There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's `grotesques' - solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival. The book has influenced many American writers, including ernest hemingway, William Faulkner, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates. It reshaped the development of the modern short story, turning the genre away from an emphasis upon plot towards a capability for illuminating the emotional lives of ordinary people. This new edition corrects errors in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Sherwood Anderson's first and most autobiographical novel and the only one set in Illinois, Windy McPherson's Son received uniformly high praise from literary critics when it was first published. It tells the story of an Iowa newsboy who fights his way to fortune in Chicago, then questions the meaning of his success. It was republished in 1922 with a different ending, which appears as an appendix in this edition.

This Norton Critical Edition includes:The 1919 first book edition of the stories, with Harald Toksvig’s original map of the fictional Winesburg.A thoughtful and thought-provoking preface and expanded explanatory footnotes by Marc K. Dudley.Selections from Anderson’s memoirs, two of them new to the Second Edition.Eight contemporary reviews of Winesburg, Ohio by critics including William Faulkner and H. L. Mencken.Nine interpretive essays, five of them new to the Second Edition.A chronology and an updated selected bibliography.

The tale of an American writer's journey through his own imaginative world and through the world of facts, with many of his experiences and impressions among other writers—told in many notes—in four books—and an Epilogue. This is a memoir of Midwestern life and culture from the author of Winesburg, Ohio."The voice of the soliloquist . . . amplifies the drama of A Story Teller's Story, as does the persistent theme of escape, from an America of fact and factories, marketing and manufacturing, to the borderless Ohios of imagination and creation."—From the introduction by Thomas Lynch

In 1927, tired of the literary life of New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago, a famous but aging American writer named Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) -- author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and other short stories in which he virtually invented the modern American short story -- moved to rural Southwest Virginia to write for and edit two small-town weekly newspapers that he owned, the Marion Democrat and the Smyth County News. Living again among the small-town figures with whom he was usually most content, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolf, and indeed an entire generation of the greatest American writers -- worked for several years at making his newspaper nationally famous while struggling to come to terms with a life-threatening psychological depression and a failing third marriage. Both of Anderson's midlife problems were complicated when he met Eleanor Copenhaver, lovely young daughter in one of the prominent first families of Marion and a career social worker for the YWCA. Trying to keep their ardent affair secret in the small town, Anderson avidly courted the socially prominent and much younger Miss Copenhaver while at the same time trying to free himself from his embittered third wife and overcome the disadvantages of his age and his lover's family's distrust of him. Having by the end of 1931 continued for three years his surreptitious and consuming affair with Miss Copenhaver, Anderson determined on the first day of 1932 that the new year should be the year of decisions for him to gain his love in marriage or perhaps to end his life, and he began the new year with a creative venture unique in literature. Starting on January 1st, Anderson secretly wrote and hid away for Eleanor Copenhaver to find after his eventual death one letter each day, letters that she should someday discover, whether they had ever become married or not, and thereby relive in her memory their days of intense lovemaking a mutual despair about their then-unlikely marriage. Found by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson only at Sherwood Anderson's death in 1941 and then preserved intact by this grieving widow who had married Anderson in 1933, the carefully hidden letters of 1932 recording their intense and seemingly doomed love affair have remained secret until now. Chosen by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson before her death in 1985 to publish her husband's secret love letters, Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White has prepared a fascinating edition of these unique letters for the enjoyment of students and scholars of literature as well as for all other readers who savor compelling and inspiring stories of loss and love.

Completed one year after his classic Winesburg, Ohio and long regarded as his finest novel, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White captures the spirit of small-town America during the Machine Age. Hugh McVey is a protagonist Robert Lovett once called "a symbol of the country itself in its industrial progress and spiritual impotence." A lonely and passionate inventor of farm machinery, he struggles to gain love and intimacy in a community where "life had surrendered to the machine." Through his story Anderson aims his criticism at the rise of technology and industry at the turn of the century. Simultaneously, he renders a tale of eloquent naturalism and disturbing beauty. Poor White was praised by such writers as H. L. Mencken and Hart Crane when it was first published. It remains a curiously contemporary novel, and a marvelous testament to Sherwood Anderson's "sombre metaphysical preoccupation and his smouldering sensuousness" (The New Republic).

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago advertising writer from Ohio, a failure as a businessman, husband, and father, published a small yellow book of short stories intended to "reform" American literature. Against all expectations, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life achieved what its author intended: after 1919 and after Winesburg, Ohio, American literature would be written and read freshly and differently.Winesburg, Ohio has never been out of print, but never has Anderson's book been published in the form and with the editorial care that the work has needed and deserved. The present text, authorized by the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust, is an expert text. The editor has relied on years of experience in editing Sherwood Anderson and has consulted all Anderson manuscripts, typescripts, letters, and diaries and all editions of the book to present the masterpiece in its intended state.New to this expert edition of Winesburg, Ohio are historical and cultural annotations, documentation of changes in the various editions, identification of the Ohio originals for Anderson's characters, and maps bearing the streets and buildings of the real town of Clyde, Ohio, which is the basis of Anderson's fictional account.Included as well are unique photographs of Anderson and Clyde, Ohio, illustrations that deepen knowledge and feeling for the author's actual hometown and time, revealing Winesburg, Ohio to be an intensely local narrative—very much an "Ohio" book—and yet a book that has found and held worldwide attention.

Still fresh and strikingly contemporary, the stark realism of these stories carefully explores the dreams and emotions of Sherwood Anderson's unforgettable characters. In Death in the Woods, we travel deep into the heart of America as Anderson saw it, to find an introspective man, in a desolate landscape, questioning the very meaning of his world.