Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded in bringing
together a surface of farce with an undertone of
tragedy. "The Egg" is an American masterpiece.

Anderson's influence upon later American writers,
especially those who wrote short stories, has been
enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both
praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of
feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the
American short story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson's
"was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and
phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary
controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost
a fetish of simplicity ... to seek always to penetrate
to thought's uttermost end." And in many younger
writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson
influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes
of his voice.

Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the
poet Algernon Swinburne once said: "If he touches you
once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps hold of;
his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of
your spiritual furniture forever." So it is, for me and
many others, with Sherwood Anderson.

To the memory of my mother,

EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,

whose keen observations on the life about
her first awoke in me the hunger to see
beneath the surface of lives,
this book is dedicated.

THE TALES
AND THE PERSONS

THE BOOK OF
THE GROTESQUE

The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some
difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the
house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look
at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter
came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with
the window.

Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter,
who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the
writer's room and sat down to talk of building a
platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer
had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.

For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed
and then they talked of other things. The soldier got
on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him
to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner
in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The
brother had died of starvation, and whenever the
carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the
old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he
puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up