Search Results

This chapter examines the other collaborators in William Faulkner's writing career. It explains that aside from Estelle Oldham, Faulkner also collaborated with Sherwood and Elizabeth Anderson who were instrumental in providing him with the actual and imaginative environment he needed to begin to transform himself from poet to novelist. It also mentions that Anderson's and Estelle's imaginative responses to Faulkner's fantasies fed him with the love and he needed to push further off on his own.

This chapter examines the attitudes displayed and the choices made by George Willard, the protagonist in Sherwood Anderson's 1919 book Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life, as a reflection of the “generation gap” between the Progressive generation and the Gilded Age generation. It first analyzes the character of George Willard and places the town of Winesburg in context before turning to Anderson's depiction of the challenges inherent in the historical progression of a family economy model to one of sheltered childhood. It also explains how George Willard's story foregrounds the significance of adaptation to an evolving idea of childhood in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Chapter 6 traces Carl Van Doren’s claim in 1921 that Spoon River Anthology founded a literary “Revolt from the Village.” Van Doren argued that Midwestern authors inspired by Masters, such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, formed a literary movement that exposed the hypocritical underside of the United States through a critique of small-town America. The dissemination of this argument can be traced to intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, who popularized Freudian theory as a way to critique bourgeois mores and American capitalism. However, other popular authors, like William Allen White, celebrated Midwestern towns as ideal communities as a counter to these critiques. Thus, in the 1920s, a short-lived culture war arose around rival interpretations of Masters’s portrayal of American small towns.

This chapter explores industrialization as an etiology of sexuality, charting how the compartmentalization of sexuality develops around sexual object choice. Taking a hint from scholars like John D’Emilio and Henry Abelove who understand economic forces to have an enormous impact on sexual life, this chapter examines industrialization’s transformation not just of the ways that we produce objects, but also how industrialization is imagined to invent sexual objects. More specifically, this chapter considers how Fordism was understood by Antonio Gramsci and Sherwood Anderson to standardize sexual object choice in order to create the hegemonic system of sexual orientation dominant in America and much of Europe. This chapter attends to the ways in which Anderson’s text Winesburg, Ohio (1919) both locates consumer and sexual objects at the center of modern fields of desire and imagines the inhabitants of the small Ohio town to enact nonindustrialized and nonstandardized sexual pleasures.

Chapter 3 examines Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a text that was written when managerial capitalism was in full emergence, and when the literary influence of the American sentimental novel seemed to be in full decline. In Winesburg, Ohio, what seems to be at first a full repudiation of the sentimental tradition becomes an appropriation of sentimental form. Even in a society where bodies appear to be isolated beyond resolve, the sentimental touch remains the only successful mode of communication. Anderson's deployment of the sentimental touch shows us that American modernism—despite its aspirations—is not a full rupture from the past. Indeed, the persistence of the sentimental trope in an unsentimental world signals the ossification of literary structure alongside the hardening of bureaucratic frameworks. The chapter argues that Anderson's use of an atavistic trope marks his vexed relationship with the pressures of managerialism.

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the original homeland of bohemia--the Parisian Latin Quarter--in the nation. Bohemianism flourished in the New Orleans of the 1920s, taking root in a series of local institutions, including the modernist literary journal the Double Dealer. The journal carefully navigated bohemian-bourgeois tension, the modern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive. Featuring such writers as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, the New Orleans bohemia that existed on and off the pages of the Double Dealer provided a liminal territory, alternately challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies and mediating a series of social and cultural divides. The lively, engaging, and frustrating "talk, talk, talk" (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues featured in Faulkner's roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national, and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia.

This chapter uses The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to frame and advance this book’s central argument about Stein’s masculine homosocial relationships with her colleagues. Tracking the dynamics of vision that animate The Autobiography, I argue that it uses Toklas’s loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein’s masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds. The Autobiography depicts those ties as very congenial with men such as Sherwood Anderson and with masculine women such as Jane Heap, but more fraught—and more likely to induce perspectival vacillation—with Hemingway and Picasso. This multiperspectivalism structures the book and mobilizes multiple narratives of modernism’s emergence. In so doing, The Autobiography reframes Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Toklas as part of the appearance of the new that the text initially attributes solely to the formal properties of modern art and writing.

This chapter examines the pervasiveness of male homosexuality in William Faulkner’s early prose writings. It suggests that Faulkner’s anxiety about “cultural conflations of male artistry and male homosexuality” can be traced to his literary apprenticeship in New Orleans and his friendship with the painter William Spratling. The chapter argues that it was the openly gay Spratling, not Sherwood Anderson as critics claim, who stood at the center of a circle of artists during Faulkner’s time in New Orleans. Faulkner and Spratling lived together for several months, traveled to Europe together, and shared many similarities and interests, including their collaborative 1926 book, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles. Strong homoerotic currents are evident in Faulkner’s early sketches, written for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the literary magazine Double Dealer, as well as some of the scenes and portrayals in his novel Mosquitoes. The chapter concludes that Spratling was a “significant source of inspiration” for Faulkner’s fiction of the 1920s.

In 1926, Mencken was at the zenith of his popularity. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people”. This chapter analyzes Mencken's celebrity: his popularity among college students and writers, both in the United States and overseas. Ironically, for all of his popularity, a deep well of loneliness gripped him. Mencken met Hollywood actress Aileen Pringle, and began a passionate love affair.

This chapter corrects the long-held assumption that the form began with modernist blockbusters and instead suggests that modernist writers revised a vibrant regionalist tradition to their own uses. It trace the development of the cycle from a regionalist tradition often marked by an attention to the experiences of women and those living on the fringes of America. Nineteenth-century village sketch narratives, such as Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), served to incorporate towns, distanced from cultural centers, into the national imaginary. These cycles depend upon the construction of a restricted geographic terrain to contain and ground the narratives; in other words, they stake out “limited locality” to encompass the stories. Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) continue to question the extent to which geographic proximity produces communal affiliation, which is often imagined as an antidote to the poisons of industrialization.

Building on correspondence, essays, and public statements, the second chapter examines the ongoing significance of place to contemporary cycles. Although Winesburg, Ohio did not originate the genre, it has had the most enduring and wide influence on cycles in recent decades, a period which has seen the resurgence of the cycle because community itself is being reimagined in response to the volatility of the economy. This chapter focus on texts whose authors explicitly cite Anderson’s influence: Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2004), and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar (2007). Anderson hails Winesburg as enabling “a new looseness” in fiction; that sense of novelty and innovation recurs in authors’ statements about reading Winesburg for the first time, citing its transformative and revelatory power. These contemporary writers narrow even within the small town settings to focus on a particular, marginalized population, thereby amplifying the pervasiveness of alienation in contemporary America.

In its reading of the bone people, this chapter reexamines Keri Hulme’s controversial borrowings from literary modernism in light of her claims to represent a postcolonial identity derived from Māori cultural traditions. The chapter distinguishes between a “modernist critical realism” deriving from Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson and a more formally experimental modernism employing myth, fantasy, intertextual borrowings, and Joycean wordplay. This second strain of modernism has raised doubts about the “authenticity” of Hulme’s representation of a New Zealand reborn out of Māori culture. The chapter argues that it was never Hulme’s aim to portray or preserve a pure and “authentic” Māori culture. Hulme’s narrative instead models an understanding of indigeneity as capable of incorporating modernist aesthetics within it. Hulme thus reconfigures “postcolonial hybridity” in the service of a bicultural vision of New Zealand that embraces settler culture within a distinctively Māori framework.