Number 1

(Drum Roll Please!)

(Maybe even some festive fireworks...We are talking about the Number 1 book here, aren't we?)

And the winner of the Number 1 Spot in my Top Ten Book List is:

     You cannot (should not) read a book by an American author, since the early 20th Century, that has not at least been in the smallest fashion influenced by Sherwood Anderson. He talked publishers into taking a look at both Faulkner and Hemingway (who was also greatly helped out by Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound). Faulkner mimicked him in his book, Mosquitoes. Hemingway parodied him with both, Torrents of Spring, and, To Have and Have Not. Sherwood Anderson came quietly onto the American literary scene after he was well into his 40's (this gives me hope) and changed the way Americans wrote forever. Up until Sherwood Anderson, they (American writers) tried to imitate European authors, but after Anderson, they decided what would be true American literature. It was to be plain and under spoken. It was to be raw and beautiful. It was to be transparent and hidden. Sherwood Anderson's work is all of those things. He built the model that they would later copy or emulate. Others merely added onto it. I know some will disagree, but that is fine. I have much to learn and even more to read.

   I like this book because of a multitude of reasons. The first isn't found in this book, but within the life of Sherwood Anderson. During his early forties, he had a mental breakdown and ended up disappearing for four days. When found, he said he had been wrestling with who he really was; which turned out to be a writer, something he had not really tried his hand in. Something that would transform who he was and who we remember him as: Someone who wrestled with their humanity. And that is what he writes about. People who wrestle with their places in life, their obligations, their weaknesses, their pasts, their jobs, their emotions, their relationships, etc.

   Winesburg, Ohio is a great book because it is a novel of interrelated short stories centering around the character of George Willard. The characters of this book are flawed, ineffectual, and incomplete. Anderson does not try to separate realism from fantasy. He allows the real world to collide with dreams because he knows that life is full of both the natural and the phantasmagorical. He knows that within the realness of life lays dreams and those dreams live in the quiet of each human who is compounded by their own weaknesses. These stories, although centered on the town of Winesburg and George Willard, are about a number of people in and around the town. Each of these characters and for that matter, the town itself, is fighting to live in the place where life takes place; somewhere between realism and fantasy.

  Anderson writes of the grotesque, the imperfect, the weak, the frail because he is writing of humanity as it is and not as it might be.  He focuses on single moments that define lifetimes. Single choices that are lost or won in a matter of seconds. He writes about a life that can be found in death. He writes about the beginnings of a fractured belief in the pastoral themes of sacrifice, initiation, and rebirth; something we see the negative effects of today in both life and literature. He writes of how progress may seem to be helping humanity out, but is really leaving it behind; something we see today as we live in a time of human history where we commonly think it is okay where 5% unemployment means that everyone is working that "means" something, where 5% of humans (children and the elderly) don't have purposes or a place. 

   I will not say that some of the images are not disturbing because they are. I will not say that much of the loneliness and dispair could not be remedied with Christ because they could. To me, it is books like this that highlight where the world was before Christ; hopelessness and true damnation (eternal separation from the Great Comforter).  The stories are full of simple language and simple grammar. He does not waste words or try to include every detail. He leaves room for imagination both of scene and emotion. He leaves room for the reader, or in Harold Bloom's terms, the active reader.

   However, to me, the number one reason why this book receives top honors is because I cannot read other American authors and not see Anderson's hand holding their hand as they build their characters. I cannot read McCullers, O'Connor, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Capote, Harper Lee, Wolfe, Berry, Eliot, and a host of others and not feel them looking over their artistic shoulders and making sure that Sherwood is watching and will in the end approve of what they have written or at least tell them they are headed in the right direction. Maybe this means I am not seeing well or that I do not know enough to see properly and this just may well be the case, but for now it is the way things are.

  Wishing to write as Anderson did,

           David