Anderson's Appalachian Years

Anderson's Appalachian Years by William Terrell Cornett Sherwood Anderson, an Appalachian writer? Sounds a little absurd, doesn't it? Every high school graduate knows Anderson's name is linked inextricably with the American Midwest—especially with Ohio. True enough. Yet for a writer who avoided regionalism and local color (in their usual senses) for most of his active career, it seems ironic to find Anderson's name associated not only with one region, but, increasingly, with two. Yet such is the case today. The first fifty years of Anderson 's life and work have been adequately documented and analyzed. The last fifteen are generally glossed over by most present scholarship as years of either no ideas, or general artistic failure, or both. Anderson's retreat to the Southern Appalachians is often seen as a literary retreat as well. 18 What I want to show is that Anderson's later writings were indeed highly reflective of his adopted home, yet were not narrowly regionalistic. He never discounted the larger world from the vantage point of his rural retreat. I will look, therefore, at the contents of several of these "Appalachian" writings, and trace something of his use of the overriding philosophical stance which guided him through much that he wrote between about 1925 and 1940—in other words, during his Appalachian years. My secondary purpose is to help promote a general (if albeit compressed ) familiarity with this lesser-known period of Anderson's life, demonstrating that the nature of subjects and stylistic qualities present in both his fiction and non-fiction of the 1920s and '30s are frequently continuations of basic interests and approaches found in earlier, more celebrated works. Some literary evaluations will be made, but the focus will remain on Anderson as man and author, rather than on his writings. Finally, I want to consider the modern implications of Anderson's choosing to become a resident of a small country town. The present decade finds person after person bound in by an urban setting wanting to become just that. Before discussing Anderson's move to southwest Virginia, I would like to look briefly at the flow of his life up to that time. Born September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio (not far from Cincinnati), Sherwood Anderson had relatively little formal education and went to work at a variety of jobs at an early age. (So active was he that he soon acquired the nickname of "Jobby.") Moving with his family to Clyde, Ohio, in 1884, he exhibited none of the stereotypical qualities of the budding author. But the small town of Clyde was to serve him in good stead much later when it became the mythical midwestern town of his work, especially the model for Winesburg. After the death of his mother in 1895 the maturing family went in various directions: Sherwood to Chicago and, in 1898, to the wind-up of the Spanish-American War. Staying with his brother Karl in Springfield, Ohio, after his army service discharge, he briefly attended Wittenburg College. From there he returned to Chicago, imbued with businessmen's ideals, and began a writing career of sorts by contributing to such trade journals as Agricultural Advertising. In 1904 he married Cornelia Lane, an Ohio-born schoolteacher, and soon after started into business as president of a mail-order jobbing agency in Cleveland. In 1907 he went in business for himself, operating a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, which specialized in a product called "RoofFix ." Then in 1912 he succumbed emotionally to the pressures of business and private life and left his company, wife, and three children. After recovering from this breakdown , he went back to Chicago, which for the next ten years (1913-1923) he called home and where his artistic career blossomed as he became a part of the famed "Chicago Renaissance." In 1914 he divorced Cornelia and two years later married the "liberated" Tennessee Mitchell. As with his first wife, her superior education was an asset to his literary struggles —and was also a source of resentment. In 1923 they, too, were divorced. By that time he was living in New Orleans, having become fascinated with the mystique of the South...