Mr. Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, on 13 September, 1876. He has published an autobiographical volume, A Story-Teller's Story (1924), from which information concerning his life may be obtained, though the book is neither a consecutive narrative, nor complete, nor, as he himself says, by any means free from fiction. His father was "a ruined dandy from the South" who kept a harnessrepair shop until it failed, and who then became "ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a 'sign-writer.' The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do,... but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life." Mr. Anderson's mother, who died when he was still a young boy, was a woman of Italian extraction who had been a bound servant in a farmer's family when his father had met her and married her. The family was poor and led almost a vagabond existence. The mother was a woman of character, but the father was a ne'er-do-well who lived in a world of brightly colored dreams. Sometimes, while mother and children were left to shift for themselves, this father managed to secure board and lodging for himself from farmers and their wives by the romantic tales he invented concerning his past. The family had begun to disintegrate when Mr. Anderson was yet a small boy, and the death of his mother hastened the process. He attended public schools for a time, but apparently not for long. When other boys were preparing for college he was already earning his own living-was employed in a nail factory, rolling kegs of nails from a warehouse to waiting trucks. He did not continue long at any one job, however. He had a passion for readingnovels and romances at first, then memoirs, and some history-and whenever he managed to get a few dollars ahead he threw up his job and did nothing save read books from public libraries until he was again without money. Then he obtained a new job, assembled parts in a bicycle-factory, or helped to care for race-horses, until he had earned another period of reading. When the Spanish War came he enlisted. He happened at the time to have a hundred dollars-the result of his rescue of a drunken man from robbers—and for greater effect he purchased new clothes and a walking-stick and returned to his native town to enlist, so that the people who knew him could see how well he was doing in life and could appreciate the sacrifice he was making in fighting for his country. The people "rose," and tried to make a hero of him, and he liked it. Later he managed to start a small manufacturing business, but he had no head for buying and selling, the business soon began to go badly, and he suddenly quitted it in disgust. He then became an advertisement-writer in Chicago.

By this time Mr. Anderson knew that he was a story-teller, and only a story-teller, a man of words and fancies-fancies so vivid and inevitable that he could scarcely keep them distinct from the world of fact. And he was writing, writing, trying to get his matter faithfully into words, in whatever time he could steal from the advertisement-business. Several of his tales, moreover, were published, in The Little Review, and in The Seven Arts, and this helped him to conquer his fears, born of the notion that only cultured and educated people could hope to produce literature. He went to New York, became acquainted with writers and critics, and discovered that the only people who had solved the problems of the craft of fiction were the factory-hands of the periodicals, the men who produced machine-made 'plot-stories," with the aim, not of exploring reality, but of amusing or distracting their readers. He also discovered that apparently there was a new and growing interest in problems of the craft of fiction, and likewise in the effort to create an authentic "United States beauty" by a faithful and untrammeled handling of the lives of real people-that, indeed, there was a growing naturalistic school of American writers, in whose ranks he was already enrolled.

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Thus encouraged, Mr. Anderson published his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, in 1916, and since then other volumes have followed rapidly: Marching Men (1917; novel), Mid-American Chants (1918; poems), Winesburg, Ohio (1919; tales), Poor White (1920; novel), The Triumph of the Egg (1921; tales), Many Marriages (1922; novel), Horses and Men (1923; tales), Dark Laughter (1925; novel), and Notebook, (1926; essays and brief observations). "Tar," The Story of a Mid-American Childhood will be published in the fall of 1926, and Mr. Anderson has in preparation a novel to be entitled Another Man's House.

Mr. Anderson is at once a conscious artist and a seeker after truth. He insists that his books are not transcripts from life, but imaginative creations, yet adds that the imagination can fruitfully be fed

only by naked reality. Thus his novels and tales have a marked autobiographical element, while his autobiography contains, as has been mentioned, many imaginative details. As a creator he tends to follow art for art's sake, and endeavors after complete independence of literary, social, and moral conventions, so that he may be wholly faithful to his vision, whatever it may be, and equally free to express it. He also, however, earnestly seeks to understand life, which has bewildered and baffled him. He is confident that there is a good way of life which industrial America as he has known it somehow has lost consciousness of, and he seems to feel that all conventions and standards are deadening shackles the repudiation of which, throwing open the gates to free individual development, would reawaken our dormant intelligence and our dormant sensitiveness to beauty, and so make life for every one a rich and ennobling experience. This is well illustrated by some sentences from the initial tale in Winesburg, Ohio, probably Mr. Anderson's best book: "All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques." They were not all horrible. "Some were amusing, some almost beautiful," but all were grotesques. And the reason was, "That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. . . There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, and of carelessness and abandon. . . . And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood." It must be felt that the quality of Mr. Anderson's work would be different were it not for his very one-sided experience of life and for his lack of the ordered historical understanding which liberal education aims to give. Nevertheless, his novels and tales are notable not only for their honesty, their vividness, and their limited range of truth to human nature, but also for their indictment of rigid standardization in art, industry, and life, their exhibition of the emptiness of material prosperity, and their fresh and vigorous insistence upon the high value of independence, courage, and personal integrity.

...

A MAN OF IDEAS1

He lived with his mother, a gray, silent woman with a peculiar ashy complexion. The house in which they lived stood in a little grove of trees beyond where the main street of Winesburg crossed Wine Creek. His name was Joe Welling, and his father had been a man of some dignity in the community, a lawyer and a member of the state legislature at Columbus. Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire. No, he wasn't like that he was like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk. He was like that, only that the visitation that descended upon Joe Welling was a mental and not a physical thing. He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his

1 This and the following two tales are reprinted from Winesburg, Ohio with the permission of the publishers, The Viking Press, Inc., B. W. Huebsch, Inc.

ideas was uncontrollable. Words rolled and tumbled from his mouth. A peculiar smile came upon his lips. The edges of his teeth that were tipped with gold glistened in the light. Pouncing upon a bystander he began to talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed into his face, peered into his eyes, pounded upon his chest with a shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention.

In those days the Standard Oil Company did not deliver oil to the consumer in big wagons and motor trucks as it does now, but delivered instead to retail grocers, hardware stores and the like. Joe was the Standard Oil agent in Winesburg and in several towns up and down the railroad that went through Winesburg. He collected bills, booked orders, and did other things. His father, the legislator, had secured the job for him.

In and out of the stores of Winesburg went Joe Welling-silent, excessively polite, intent upon his business. Men watched him with eyes in which lurked amusement tempered by alarm. They were waiting for him to break forth, preparing to flee. Although the seizures that came upon him were harmless enough, they could not be