Sherwood Anderson and the Contemporary Short-Story Cycle
Jennifer J. Smith
Chapter Six, “Sherwood Anderson and the Contemporary Short Story Cycle,” draws on comparative analysis of contemporary authors who explicitly cite Anderson’s influence. This essay thereby establishes Winesburg, Ohio’s ongoing influence on fiction, particularly short-story cycles, including Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter, and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar. The chapter uses this premise in order to demonstrate how Winesburg cast the “the revolution of modernity,” as Anderson himself phrased it, in terms of a mode of literary expression invested in both realism and avant-garde practices. The short-story cycles by Bradbury, Banks, Day, and Barry extend the limits of realism and experimentation as they engage with the conventions of science fiction, myth, and postmodernism. The commonality of form, setting, and subject among these works ultimately position Winesburg as a pioneer in exploring the malleability of both genre and literary style.
Three years before Ray Bradbury started working on the stories that would become The Martian Chronicles (1950), he read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). In the introduction to the revised 1997 edition, Bradbury claims that reading Anderson’s volume was a turning point in his own work: “It was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio that set me free. Sometime in my twenty-fourth year, I was stunned by its dozen characters living their lives on half-lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town. ‘Oh, Lord,’ I cried. ‘If I could write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that would be!’” (viii). Separately conceived, Bradbury’s stories feature characters that, for the most part, do not recur, and there is no central figure to connect the stories. He had published many of the stories previous to their inclusion
122 Jennifer J. Smith in the volume under different names and with different details. Bradbury calls the form a “book-of-stories-pretending-to-be-a-novel” and lists his Dandelion Wine (1957) as following in the same tradition (x). Bradbury admits that his stories diverge somewhat from the model offered in Winesburg:
Will you find blood traces of Sherwood Anderson here? No. His stunning influence has long since dissolved into my ganglion. … Anderson’s grotesques were gargoyles off the town roofs; mine are mostly collie dogs, old maids lost in soda fountains, and a boy supersensitive to dead trolley cars, lost chums, and Civil War Colonels drowned in time or drunk on remembrance. The only gargoyles on Mars are Martians disguised as my Green Town relatives, hiding out until comeuppance. (x)
Bradbury explains how he drew from Anderson’s emphasis on a cast of characters turned beautifully grotesque by the conditions of their lives. Winesburg influenced The Martian Chronicles in its design, the stories’ emphasis on place, and the treatment of figures that Anderson terms “grotesques.” The influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg—not just on Bradbury, but on American fiction in general—has been immense. Anderson’s volume of short stories, depicting the submerged desires and frustrations of citizens in a small town, opened up new vistas in terms of setting, subject, and style. In “A Note on Sherwood Anderson,” William Faulkner articulates his indebtedness to Anderson by recounting advice Anderson had given him:
‘You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn’ he told me, ‘It dont [sic] matter where it was, just so you remember it and aint [sic] ashamed of it. Because one place to start from is just as important as any other place. You're a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from. But that’s all right too.’ (8)
Faulkner credits Anderson for encouraging him to write about Mississippi, allowing locality to permeate his writing. Winesburg, as an embodiment of specific geographic authenticity, proved transportable as