Sherwood Anderson

"Here [is] a new order of short story," said H. L. Mencken when Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own." Indeed, Sherwood Anderson's timeless cycle of loosely connected tales--in which a young reporter named George Willard probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of the solitary people in a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--embraced a new frankness and realism that ushered American literature into the modern age. "There are moments in American life to which Anderson gave not only the first but the final expression," wrote Malcolm Cowley. "Winesburg, Ohio is far from the pessimistic or morbidly sexual work it was once attacked for being. Instead it is a work of love, an attempt to break down the walls of loneliness, and, in its own fashion, a celebration of small-town life in the lost days of good will and innocence."

Southern Odyssey contains the best of Sherwood Anderson's writings about the region where he spent the last sixteen years of his life. In more than forty selections of journalism and fiction, Anderson explores the people and problems of the South. The pieces collected here present Anderson's perceptive vision of the South, combining his love for the region with the fresh observations of an outsider. His work reflects a range of issues that engaged all southerners at a crucial time in their history—the Great Depression, the influence of the New Deal, the painful transition from agriculture to mechanization, the struggle of labor to unionize, and the elemental divisions of race—always with an eye toward the human side of things. Anderson's impressions and convictions concerning his southern experience encompassed more than its troubles, however. He also wrote of the splendor of a Shenandoah spring and the strength of character of the native people. Southern Odyssey is more than a personal record—it is a gallery of southern portraits, drawn in the style that distinguishes Anderson's prose at its best.

Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction—evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. "Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America," wrote H. L. Mencken. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own." With Commentary by Sherwood Anderson, Rebecca West, and Hart Crane