I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.
This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.
What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time he enlisted int he army to fight in the Spanish-American War.
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