Lanterna Rally

Author: Sherwood SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Publisher:

Published: 2021-07-19

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13:

Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories, relatively in order, during the late fall of 1915. The majority were finished by the middle of 1916. The story "Godliness" was not originally written as part of the collection but was salvaged by Anderson from a failed novel attempt in 1917. Many of the tales were based on a life Anderson had witnessed in Clyde, Ohio, the town where he spent most of his childhood and adolescent years. The hero's mother, Elizabeth Willard, dies at the same age as Anderson's mother did. The impressions he gained from the town life and character of Clyde explains why he gave the book the subtitle, "A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life." The book however was written while Anderson was in Chicago, three to four years after his mid-life crisis of 1912. After this event, he left his life in Elyria, Ohio and returned to Chicago, with his family, to his old job writing advertisement copy. Though he did not reject business values completely as he liked to claim after his breakdown, he did give much more time to his creative writing hobby and was able to publish his first book, a novel Windy McPherson's Son, in 1916. Marching Men, his second novel, and the first book he published were considered by Anderson to be immature works of which he was never really proud. Often throughout Anderson's career, however, he would publish works that he knew were flawed and was thus often criticized by critics who were not able to separate his weaker works from the fine ones. Winesburg, Ohio has since been acclaimed a timeless classic with generational and universal themes, illustrating that even as Anderson wrote his first two novels he was also creating a quality text.