This Day in Literary History

March 8, 1941—In one of the more bizarre—not to mention painful—means of passing on, novelist-short-story writer Sherwood Anderson died at age 64 of peritonitis in Colon, Panama. Over a week before, he had accidentally ingested a toothpick at a New York party, just as he was about to embark on a cruise for South America with his wife.

What a cruel way to go--though perhaps not as cruel as The Torrents of Springs, Ernest Hemingway's parody of the writer who served as one of his mentors, nor as cruel as the literary canon's amnesia about one of the masters of the 20th century short story.

Anderson may resemble nobody so much as Raymond Carver. Both utterly changed the content and voice of the short story of their day. Both were generous mentors toward younger writers. Both lived lives as dream-haunted and conflicted as their characters before, late in life, meeting women who finally made them happy. (In Carver's case, poet, longtime companion and eventual wife Tess Gallagher; in Anderson's, his fourth wife, Eleanor Copenhaver, a YWCA official who influenced his last decade of labor activism and social criticism.)

Anderson wrote in a number of genres—the short story, the novel, the essay--but Winesburg, Ohio is his most famous work. It forms a quartet of books, all released within five years of each other, in which fiction writers and poets anatomized a particular small town and found more material than anyone could have imagined. The other three books I’m thinking of are Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology; Edwin Arlington Robinson’s The Man Against the Sky, with a number of its poems set in “Tilbury Town”; and Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street.

I myself have lived virtually my entire life in a small city in northeast New Jersey, but its scale feels closer to the setting of these books than a major metropolis, so I find the world these writers recreate to be of compelling interest.

In October 2005, I attended, of all things, a musical adaptation of Winesburg, Ohio at Philadelphia's Arden Theatre Company. I had visited this theater only once previously—for a production three years before of Arthur Miller's early drama, All My Sons—and had been favorably impressed.

The book and lyrics were by Eric Rosen, with music and additional lyrics by Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman. The music was based, appropriately enough, on folk music—just the type of seemingly simple, grass-roots material from which the book itself has its roots—complete with fiddle, mandolin and banjo.

I can't say I went out of the theater humming the songs, but ever since Stephen Sondheim, this is no longer a major requirement for a musical. The show really had all the intimacy of chamber music, capturing perfectly the fierce but inchoate yearnings of restless hearts and helping audiences see afresh the man who inspired this.