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.