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 anyone
             who reads his book.

    Once freed from the army,
           I started
              to write literary criticism,
         and in 1951
             I published
                   a critical biography of Anderson.

    It came shortly
       after Lionel Trilling's
             influential essay
        attacking Anderson,
           an attack from
              which Anderson's reputation
                would never quite recover.

    Trilling charged Anderson with
          indulging 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 Winesburg,
           Ohio.

    In my book I tried,
           somewhat awkwardly,
         to bring
               together the kinds
                   of judgment Trilling
            had made with my
                  still keen affection
                       for the best
                           of Anderson's writings.

    By then,
        I had read writers
             more complex,
         perhaps more distinguished
               than Anderson,
           but his muted stories
              kept a firm
                   place in my memories,
         and the book
             I wrote
                might be
                      seen as a gesture
                           of thanks
                         for the light
         --a glow of darkness,
               you might say--
           that he
            had brought to me.

    Decades passed.

    I no longer read Anderson,
           perhaps fearing
             I might have
                  to surrender
                       an admiration of youth.

    (There are some writers one
        should never return to.)

    But now,
           in the fullness of age,
         when asked
              to say a few
                 introductory
                    words
                   about Anderson and his work,
           I have again
              fallen under the spell
                   of Winesburg,
         Ohio,
           again responded
               to the half-spoken desires,
         the flickers of longing
             that spot its pages.

    Naturally,
           I now
              have some changes of response:
        a few of the stories
               no longer
              haunt me as once
             they did,
           but the long story
         "Godliness,"
            which years ago
             I considered a failure,
           I now
              see as
                   a quaintly effective account
                 of the way religious fanaticism
                   and material acquisitiveness
            can become intertwined
                   in American experience.

    Sherwood Anderson
        was born
               in Ohio in 1876.

    His childhood and youth
           in Clyde,
         a town with
              perhaps three thousand souls,
         were scarred
               by bouts of poverty,
           but he also
            knew some
                   of the pleasures