【英文原著类】Winesburg Ohio(小城畸人故事集).pdf

Winesburg, Ohio
Winesburg, Ohio
By Sherwood Anderson
1
Winesburg, Ohio
INTRODUCTION
by Irving Howe
I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I
first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches
of Sherwood Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he was
opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried
truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns
that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the
scenes of wasted life, wasted love--was this the "real" America?--that
Anderson sketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book
seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.
Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I spent
my last weekend pass on a somewhat 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 any- one who reads his book.
Once freed from the army, I started to write liter- ary criticism, and in
1951 I published a critical biog- raphy of Anderson. It came shortly after
Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an at- tack from
which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged
Anderson with in- dulging 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 Wines- burg, Ohio.
In my book I tried, somewhat awk- wardly, to bring together the kinds of
judgment Trilling h