Making It New: 1900–1945 343Caldwell were indebted to him because he introduced new methods of storytelling,
in terms of style and narrative focus, and new ways of structuring stories into a cycle.
Anderson came late to writing. Born in Camden, Ohio, he spent the first two decades
of his life in small towns of northern Ohio, in particular Clyde, which became the
setting for his finest work, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). He participated in the Spanish–
American War, took up a career in advertising, then founded a paint business. Then,
in 1912, as he tells it in his autobiography, A Story Teller’s Story (1924), he dramatically
left family and business and went to pursue a literary career in Chicago. Anderson
soon became acquainted with writers and critics of the Chicago Renaissance.
Chicago was experiencing a sudden expansion of cultural activity at the time. This
was in part a consequence of the city being established as the unofficial capital of the
Midwest; as the economic and political importance of the city grew, so did its interest
in arts and culture. In quick succession, a new university and a new symphony
orchestra were founded, both of them destined to acquire an international
reputation. It acquired its own little theater and its own bohemian quarters. Local
poets like Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters began to publish
work, much of it in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a prominent little magazine that the
poet Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) had founded in Chicago in 1912. And among
these influential figures Anderson now met, along with Sandburg, were Floyd Dell
(1887–1969), whose first novel, Moon-Calf (1920), was to distill the disillusionment
of the postwar generation, and Ben Hecht, a playwright who was to score enormous
success with The Front Page, a drama co-written with Charles MacArthur about
Chicago newspapermen. Anderson’s first book, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916),
described a man who grew up to make a great deal of money but felt little consequent
satisfaction. This was followed by Marching Men (1917), a novel about coal miners
in Pennsylvania that revealed the tyranny Anderson saw inherent in modern
capitalism, and Mid-American Chants (1918), a volume of unrhymed verse. Then
came Winesburg, Ohio. Sharing the radical instincts of “muckraking” journalists,
Anderson first arranged for extracts from the book to appear in three “insurgent”
magazines, The Seven Arts, The New Masses, and The Little Review. With the public
appetite whetted, he then published the volume which he hoped would restore
primitive American virtues, reassert what he called “the strangeness and wonder of
man,” and reveal the value of instinct – the superiority of the hidden emotional
underbelly of life to its materialist, commonplace and conventional surfaces.
Anderson dedicated Winesburg, Ohio to his mother: “whose keen observations on
the life about her,” he explained, “first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the
surface of lives.” Set in the small town of the title, the stories in the book acquire
unity through the character of George Willard, a reporter for the local newspaper
who has literary ambitions and to whom all the characters gravitate at one time or
another. And they gain further unity still from the “hunger” which becomes both
narrative source and subject. Winesburg, Ohio, the reader is told, is “The Book of the
Grotesque.” Initially, the word grotesque appears to mean some incongruity or other
that characterizes all the people the narrator has met. But then, curiously, he suggests
that grotesqueness is the product of truth or truths. “It was his notion,” we learn,GGray_c04.indd 343ray_c 04 .indd 343 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM