facing a wall." This remark seems to me both dignified
and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was some
justice in the negative responses to his later work.
For what characterized it was not so much "groping" as
the imitation of "groping," the self-caricature of a
writer who feels driven back upon an earlier self that
is, alas, no longer available.

But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and
authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a minor
key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos marking both the
nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of
himself as a "minor writer.") In a few stories,
however, he was able to reach beyond pathos and to
strike a tragic note. The single best story in
Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in which
the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign of a tragic
element in the human condition. And in Anderson's
single greatest story, "The Egg," which appeared a few
years after 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