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Studies in American Fiction123 language. Bender's discussion of Jack London cries out for some recognition of the ways in which London's sexual fantasies were given vivid shape through his characters' sea experience , and again and again the erotic significance of the sea for these writers as a covert gender language for power is missed in the name of some absolute biological struggle, Bender's own essentialist quest. A number of minor errors and repetitions could have been eliminated by careful editing ; on the other hand, Tony Angell's fifteen stark and stunning line drawings offer another critical perspective on the fictional works they interpret. Sea-Brothers defines interestingly one pattern in American male sea fiction, but it does not define "the tradition" in all its historical complexity. That task still remains. University of VirginiaRoger B. Stein Williams, Kenny J. A Storyteller and a City: Sherwood Anderson's Chicago. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1988. 314 pp. Cloth: $28.50. "It must be that I am an incurable small town man," Sherwood Anderson said in "A Writer's Conception of Realism," a talk given at Olivet College in Michigan on January 20, 1939, just two years before his death. It is true that the American small town and its people provide the substance of his best work, just as he came out of nineteenth-century Clyde, Ohio, and finally chose a small town (Marion, Virginia) over Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco, as the place in which to live and work for the last sixteen years of his life. Yet Anderson's relationship with Chicago, the City of his Mid-American world, is equally close if less fundamental to his work. Anderson came to Chicago to stay three times: in 1896, to make his way in life; in 1900, as an advertising writer and salesman; and, finally, in 1913, in flight from his business success in Elyria, Ohio. In Chicago he attended night school successfully the first time; he began to write increasingly imaginative business essays the second time; and the third time he found himself as the writer he was determined to be. Anderson recognized his closeness to the city when he asked in "Chicago—A Feeling" (Vanity Fair [Oct. 27, 1926], pp. 53, 118), "how can I write of Chicago without putting myself in?" He stated that "when I visit any other great city of the world I am a guest. When I am in Chicago I am at home. . . . No man can escape his city." It is the closeness and importance of this self-acknowledged relationship that Kenny J. Williams admirably explores in A Storyteller and a City. The study places Anderson in the context of Chicago literary and cultural history, an area in which Williams is at her surest; it examines the biographical relationship between Anderson and the city; and, of most importance , it examines the City (for Anderson, Chicago was always the City) in his work as influence as well as subject. As tempting as it might be to one as dedicated to the study of Chicago as a literary place, Williams does not exaggerate either the relationship between the man and the city or the impact of the city on the writer's work. Anderson was neither a sociologist nor an urbanologist, Williams makes clear; he was a writer, and, in spite of the often-noted autobiographical elements in his fiction (and the fictional elements in his autobiography), Chicago as place, as setting, as environment is secondary to the fictions Anderson created out of the raw material of his life and his time. That Anderson found Chicago (that Chicago was certainly the city for young fin-de-siecle Midwesterners is as clear in Dreiser's and Dell's lives and works as in Anderson's) was as fortunate for Anderson as it was for the others. Not 124Reviews only did Anderson's associations with other writers in Chicago provide impetus if not inspiration for his work, just as the city provided a clear understanding of the values of his time, but the city became for Anderson not only a place to work at the same time that he earned a living...

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