youth. (There are some writers one should never return
to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say
a few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I
have again fallen under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio,
again responded to the half-spoken desires, the
flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I
now have some changes of response: a few of the stories
no longer haunt me as once they did, but the long story
"Godliness," which years ago I considered a failure, I
now see as a quaintly effective account of the way
religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can
become intertwined in American experience.

* * *

Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His
childhood and youth in Clyde, a town with perhaps three
thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of poverty, but
he also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial
American society. The country was then experiencing
what he would later call "a sudden and almost universal
turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our
modern life of machines." There were still people in
Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America
itself, the town lived by a mixture of diluted
Calvinism and a strong belief in "progress," Young
Sherwood, known as "Jobby"--the boy always ready to
work--showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that
Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a
"go-getter," And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago