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.
THE TALES
AND THE PERSONS
THE BOOK OF
THE GROTESQUE
THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had
some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of
the house in which he lived were high and he
wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the
morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it
would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The car-
penter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War,
came into the writer's room and sat down to talk of
building a platform for the purpose of raising the
bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the car-
penter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of
the bed and then they talked of other things. The
soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in
fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once
been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost
a brother.
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