Although an examination of Sherwood Anderson’s biography would reveal various careers—that of laborer, manager of a paint factory, advertising writer, short story writer, novelist, poet, essayist, and newspaper editor—it is as a writer of short stories that he has made his most significant contribution to American letters. His concentration on form rather than plot was a key factor in liberating the American short story from the confining techniques of writers in the genteel tradition who were in vogue when Anderson was writing his first novel, Windy McPherson’s son (1916).
Anderson’s first important work, and possibly his finest, was Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of stories about the inhabitants of a small town who did not fit into the accepted pattern of community life. In these sketches his concern was with the failures rather than with the successful. Anderson told their tales with compassion and sympathy, and, through his characters’ maimed or suppressed emotions, he lent significance to neglected aspects of life in an era of respectability, easy success, and commercialism. His succeeding stories and novels evolved from this theme, which, with his experiment in form, enabled the American short story writers of the following decades to reach heights of subtlety and psychological penetration.
The principal repository of Anderson’s manuscripts is the Newberry Library in Chicago. Placed in the Library by the writer’s widow, Mrs. Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, this collection, numbering some 16,690 items, contains his extensive correspondence with publishers, editors, artists, and notable writers of the twentieth century, among them Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Thomas Wolfe (see item 753). In addition to Anderson’s numerous short stories and articles, the collection contains the manuscripts of many of his most important writings: Winesburg, Ohio, Kit Brandon, Dark laughter, Many marriages, and A new testament. His diaries for the period, 1936-1941, as well as scrapbooks of reviews and clippings, are also included. It is this collection of papers which Anderson’s future biographers and critics must consult and examine to fully assess his note-worthy influence on and contribution to American fiction.
Arrangement of the bibliography falls quite naturally into two main divisions: writings by Anderson, and writings about the man and his works. In the first section a chronological, descriptive listing of Anderson’s separately published works (together with citations for significant reprints and translations) is followed by an enumeration of books to which Anderson contributed and dramatizations of his writings. Then follows an alphabetical title listing of Anderson’s contributions to periodicals (Raymond Gozzi’s bibliography, item 593, was of value in compiling this section), a list of periodicals and newspapers which he edited, and a select list of his contributions to the Smyth County News. Writings about Anderson are listed alphabetically by author or other main entry in the second section, followed by a representative selection of reviews of Anderson’s works. We have endeavored to make our listings complete through 1959.
We are particularly grateful to Mrs. Eleanor Anderson for her interest and advice, and for allowing us to reproduce a page of the manuscript of Winesburg, Ohio from the Newberry Library Collection. For permission to use his photograph portrait of Anderson as a frontispiece, we are indebted to Mr. Edward Steichen of the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Ben C. Bowman of the Newberry Library was especially helpful in answering our numerous inquiries and in describing the contents of the Anderson Collection; without his generous assistance many bibliographical questions would have necessarily remained unanswered. Finally, we acknowledge the invaluable co-operation of librarians throughout the country in verifying citations and other points of information.
EUGENE P. SHEEHY
KENNETH A. LOHF
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 1960