quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town upon which
Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose, not
very different from most other American towns, and the few
of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson
seemed quite uninterested. This indifference would not have
surprised him; it certainly should not surprise anyone who
reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write literary
criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography
of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's
influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from
which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover.
Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous
sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in
stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There
was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least
with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which
he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried,
somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of
judgment Trilling had made with my still keen affection
for the best of Anderson's writings. By then, I had
read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished
than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place
in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a
gesture of thanks for the light--a glow of darkness,
you might say--that he had brought to me.

Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps
fearing I might have to surrender an admiration of