Publishing Sherwood Anderson’s “Group of Tales”: The Textual Presentations of the Winesburg Stories and the Modernist Legacy of Winesburg, Ohio
Matthew James Vechinski
Chapter Seven, “Publishing Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Group of Tales’: The Textual Presentations of the Winesburg Stories and the Modernist Legacy of Winesburg, Ohio,” explores the printed texts through which readers encountered the Winesburg stories, including the periodicals that published Sherwood Anderson’s short fiction prior to its appearance in book form and the various editions of the book released by different publishers. It considers how the audience of the Seven Arts, a magazine committed to defining the new American literature, and the socialist magazine The Masses would have responded to Anderson’s depictions of class, alienation, and longing. Then the essay examines how book designs across editions of Winesburg, Ohio frame the contents and in turn influence the reception of the stories and the volume as a whole. The complete publication history of Winesburg, Ohio explored here illustrates how Anderson’s innovative stories received initial attention and then became established classics of modernist fiction.
How Publishing Makes an American Modernist Classic The genre of the book Winesburg, Ohio has always attracted the interest of scholars of modernist literature. It may be read as a collection of stories, and indeed many of the tales have been published separately in anthologies of classic American short fiction. When read together, one recognizes across the stories a consistent narrative tone, a single setting, and a cast of characters that appear throughout the fiction. The hero of Winesburg, Ohio is George Willard, though his presence comes and goes throughout the tales as the witness to the strange and isolated lives of the small town Ohioans. Scholars have examined the fictional form of
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Winesburg, Ohio—not quite a novel, and not merely a collection of short stories—and mapped out the ways that Sherwood Anderson unifies his fictions without relying on a continuous narrative.1 This essay addresses the same subject by exploring the printed texts through which readers encountered the Winesburg stories, including the periodicals that published the short fiction prior to its appearance in book form and the various editions of the book released by different publishers.2 It acknowledges how reception, understood here as how readers would perceive the fictional form and unity of the stories, depends on the very documents that present the texts to readers. Therefore, this study emphasizes not only how Anderson as author gives form to his fictions, as autonomous stories and in a unified volume, but also what historical and cultural circumstances influenced the textual forms in which the Winesburg stories were published and then received. This essay offers the argument that the publication history of Winesburg, Ohio illustrates how, through periodical publication and reprint series, innovative literature of the time received initial attention and became established as classics of modernist fiction. Accordingly, the emphasis of this study is not on the perceived originality of Anderson’s fictional form, though this would have been a prime consideration in his day and in the study of modernism throughout much of the twentieth century. In an article for the inaugural issue of the Little Review in 1913, Anderson warns against “a cult of the new,” or claims of innovation that do not correspond to “truth and honesty” in the “craft of writing” (“The New Note 23”). Anderson continually defended the originality of the form of Winesburg, Ohio, in part because several celebrated collections of interconnected short stories preceded and followed his work, notably James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). In 1938, Anderson claimed that the linked story form of the Winesburg Ohio book was his creation: “It is a form in which I feel at ease. I invented it. It was mine” (qtd. in Townsend 115). This echoes a similar remark he made in his memoirs: “I have even sometimes thought that the novel form does not fit an American writer, that it is a form which had been brought in. What is wanted is a new looseness; and in Winesburg I had made my own form” (289). Anderson’s desire to take credit for creating the form and hold it up as representative of his craft of writing indicates his conviction in the originality of