CONTENTS:
I. Foreword.
II. The Introductrion.
III. The Main Part.
a) The Aftermath of the WWI and the atmosphere of the period.
b) The reflection of time notions in Sherwood Anderson"s "Winesburgh, Ohio".
IV. The Conclusion.
V. Bibliographical Reference.
Foreword.
"He is groping about, trying to find himself"
-Sherwood Anderson, "Winesburgh, Ohio"
The Introduction.
This research work is concerned with the issues of the beginning of the XXth century in the United States of America, they may be also refered to as the issues of the lost generation. Here is written an approach upon the causes and effects of the situation of that time, an investigation of common notions that were reflected in the book of Sherwood Anderson "Winesburgh, Ohio".
I have chosen this topic for several reasons. First, I was much inspired after reading the novel "Winesburgh, Ohio". Second, I have spent a year studying in the Midwest of the United States and thought that this kind of work would be a quite an interesting occupation to be involved in.
The book " Winesburgh, Ohio", written by Sherwood Anderson in 1919, deals with the search of self in American society on the level of a human soul: it is the central idea of the novel and my research. Though, the search of self is one of many outcomes of the period of the lost generation, you may read some interesting facts about the history and the problems of the lost generation.
The literature of that time consisted of different trends, but I view critical realism as a more distinguished and efficient style of interpreting information for that time. Sherwood Anderson, being a realist writer, is the one of the lost generation, who is thought to be the first to speak about it. Looking into his writings may bring out the "roots" of the lost generation.
The Main Part.
The Aftermath of the WWI and the atmosphere of the period.
To fully understand the notion of the search of self in American society we are bound to look at its history. World War I became one of the greatest landmarks in the history and appeared to be closely related to the search of self.
Even in the prewar imperialist development the United States of America became the world"s most powerful industrial nation. It held first place both the rate of industrial growth and the overall volume of industrial output.
World War I facilitated an even greater upswing in the US economy. The country was put in the extremely favorable position. Military operations swept through nearly every European country but did not touch the American continent. While the war inflicted incalculable losses upon the European people by snuffing out millions of lives and destroying thousands of factories and residences and even entire industrial districts, the United States did not undergo anything of that kind. The American army began to participate in hostilities only in the summer of 1918, that is, at the close of the war. The human losses suffered by the USA were minor compared to those of other countries, totaling 120 thousand dead in action and from disease and 230 thousand wounded. Consequently, the USA did not experience the massive destruction of its productive forces, which was inflicted upon Europe.
The enormous resources now at the disposal of corporations provided for major new investments in American industry. The ensuring industrial upsurge further increased the proportions of American production in world industrial output. By 1920 it accounted for approximately half of world output of coal, three-fifths of iron and steel production, two-thirds of oil extraction and 85 percent of world automotive output.
Thus, the first important result of US development between 1914 and 1918 was a further increase in economic might and a strengthening of its position as the economically powerful country in the world.
It was of even more significance that as a result of World War I the international financial position of the United States was fundamentally altered. Before the war it had lagged considerably behind the other imperialist states in the export of capital. According to data from 1914, American foreign investments amounted to $3 billion, a figure ten times less that British, six times less than French, and 4.5 times less than German foreign capital investments. On the other hand, European investments in the USA stood at $5 billion in 1914, significantly exceeding American foreign investments.
Thus, the second important consequence of the war was the transformation of the United States from debtor status to that of one of the basic creditors of the European countries,
The sharp increase in the relative weight of the USA in world industrial output foreign trade and international finance inexorably signalled its increasing influence in international politics. The American monopoly bourgeoisie demanded an active expansion of US spheres of interest. Reflecting these expansionist strivings the Democratic Administration under President Wilson in 1917 adopted a policy directed at gaining "world leadership",
To the moment after World War I the trend of the growth of capitalism swept "The Land of the Free..." and no one could help the beginning of a catastrophe.
This catastrophe was for the US more of a moral or intellectual order than of material one. America had not only escaped the frightful destruction of the war, she had become rich. The new decade brought with it an economic boom that was unprecedented in the stormy history of the American capitalism and not even the scandals of the Harding and Coolidge administrations could impair the general feeling of prosperity. The new plutocracy introduced new standards of social behaviour, which threw into relief the negative aspects of the "American way of Life". And the "American way of Life" consequently had a strong impact on people of the US. It is also noteworthy to analyze that impact: there were always towns with perhaps three thousand souls, scarred by bouts of poverty, who at the same time knew some of the pleasures of the pre-industrial society. Soldiers, who came back after the war, were puzzled by it. It was not their war, though they at first thought it would be an adventure, funded by government. People who came back, couldn"t find their place in the society: they had a terrible experience on one hand, and on the other was the hardships of assimilating in a new forming capitalist society (puzzled in it"s own way too), whose only goal was money.
The country was then experiencing what we would later call " a sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines." There were still people in the US who remembered the frontier, and like America itself, towns lived by a mixture of diluted Calvinism and a strong belief in "progress".
"The very power of money capital, both in its capacity to "multiply itself" and its position as the purchaser of all other values, makes it a force for alienation. The rage of making money is a thing that frights some."- Sydney Filkenstein
That rage has even become infuriatedly stupid. There is a strong moral that most definitely sets boundaries between men. "The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your entangled being."- Marx. The rage of alienation dehumanizes a person, unrecoverably takes parts of personality installing fear and mistrust.
The reflection of time notions in Sherwood Anderson"s "Winesburgh, Ohio".
Sherwood Anderson was a true representative of his time. He had gone through all wars: spiritual, material and physical. After all that he became a writer. Sherwood Anderson was a major influence on a younger generation of important writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolfe, Steinbeck, and others, both through his writings and his acts of personal kindness. It was though his influence, for example, that first books of both Faulkner and Hemingway were published.
Carl Sanburg and Gertrude Stein met in his work ??? With the one may be associated his eagerness to write about Midwesterners from whom he came, whose speech was in his ears and whose dilemmas he thought he deeply understood. From the other he derived great technical benefit. He learned from her "Three Lives" and "Tender Buttons"(1914) the necessity for craftsmanship that made it a complicated process to tell the truth. This respect for technique characteristic of the time, often saved him from the incoherence which lay near the heart of his subject. Yet, while Gertrude Stein, with whom he became firm friends when he visited Paris in 1921, he was shrewd enough to see that her own writing failed to communicate. She was important, he wrote in 1922, "not for the public but for the artist who happens to work with words as his material".
In American society there appeared a common notion of search of self. In the literary circles, as it was vividly seen, there were no sure answers for that problem. So to say there was no unity in people"s minds: here and there writers underwent changes in order to find new answers. Due to that there appeared several things, both positive and negative: new literary techniques were distinguished (...), but they were taken to the extremes by some authors. For example Gertrude Stein was accused of using the style of writing that failed to communicate, the style concerned with technique rather than with public, or another example Howells, who in comparison to Victorians "had a lack of sexuality".
But to me it seems that the reflection of the Search of Self can be better traced in the works of realists. The outline of the works written by realists can be viewed from different levels: the level of Sherwood Anderson: his comprehension of the problem "of the lost souls" can be traced on the level of a human, a group of people, or even a village; the level of Ernest Hemingway: he sets his boundaries on a more vague basis than Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway touches upon citie’s, area"s, and even whole country"s crisis. If Hemingway sets the outer boundaries, Sherwood Anderson deals with inner ones. I look upon Sherwood Anderson"s literature, because I consider that the roots of the search, or the quest are to be found in it. Historians of the American literature writing about Sherwood Anderson"s role in its development, quote John Steinbeck who, when told by an interviewer that the "age of American novel" was created by four or five authors, "Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos - and of course you", responded briefly, "No, it was created by only two Sherwood Anderson, and Dreiser. They started it all".
Sherwood Anderson proved to be a sort of a discoverer, pioneer, a mirror reflecting the phenomena of the time: the end of independent farmer, the evil reign of the material success credo, alienation of human beings who, caught in the monopolistic circles of capitalist industrial development irrevocably lose spiritual values. Vernon Louis Parrington analyzing Sherwood Anderson"s autobiographical "A Story-Teller"s Story" (1924) as "an attempt to lay bare the emotional life of one seeking to be an artist in America, to plumb his own consciousness, to escape from a world he hates", says that "Anderson is one of the three or four most important men now writing fiction in America".
Though his chapter on Sherwood Anderson is entitled "Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist", Mr.Parrington lets his reader form an impression that he is describing a critical realist who is "unlike our earlier naturalists in handling of materials interests, concerned with inner life rather than outer, with hidden drives rather than environment". To prove that Anderson is a naturalist, the critic points out that he "accepts the main criteria of naturalism: determinism, distortion, pessimism" and is "a lean and sparing writer (probably with reference to his style which allows him to say much in a few words) whose symbolisms are obscure and puzzling". The critic claims, however, that Sherwood Anderson"s theme is "the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create grotesques". Among the factors causing those frustrations he mentions "crude, narrow environment" that drives to strange aberrations and "repressed instincts that break forth in abnormal action". Saying this he somewhat contradicts himself, for he had just admitted that Sherwood Anderson was concerned with "hidden drives rather than environment". Or rather Mr.Parrington should have mentioned the close interconnection of those, that there is a certain balance between the inner and the outer that regulates the emotions, thoughts and feelings of a human being, that when it [the balance] is broken a person is transformed into a grotesque, a deformed and unnatural state of being. One might probably put it differently, saying that objectively Sherwood Anderson"s reader would feel compelled to look for causes that produced unhappy warped personalities, not one or two, but nearly whole towns of them, and find those causes in the hostile environment a money-oriented, material success-minded society where the much-advertised individualism is the law of life.
How much he managed to learn of his craft was shown by his first widely succesful book, "Winesburgh, Ohio"(1919). This is a collection of stories, or scetches, about a small town of the kind Anderson knew from his boyhood. Some of the characters are old, crabbed, and eccentric, or born down by failure. Others are restless adolescents. But all - young, old and in-between - are puzzled people. They have been misunderstood, they seek to understand, they long for love and recognition; or else, wrapped in their obsessive fancies, they voice ideas though certain no one will listen to them. Winesburgh holds them all, as Spoon River cemetery holds its inhabitants. Their dreams burgeon when its streets had gone dark. The stories are given unity by their common setting, for most people in Winesburgh know something of one another. Yet the closeness of acquaitance underlines the degree to which its citisens are remote from one another. A young reporter named George Willard enters the stories in some as an actor, in others merely a confidant. His presence also helps to correct the centrifugal tendency of Anderson"s plots; and his departure from Winesburgh at the end of the book, bound for the City on the morning train, gathers all the sketches together in a young man"s vision of escape.
The stories in Winesburgh are uneven to merit. The young and their awkward love affairs, are beautifully rendered, for the Andersonian yearning has exactly the quality of adolescence. Some of the elders, too, are sensitively defined - as in "Philosopher", where the half-mad Dr.Percival declares that "everyone in the world is Chist and they are all crusified". the effect of the story lies in the fact that, while this assertion is almost ludicrously untrue of the doctor"s immediate situation, it nevertheless contains a general truth.
The theme of grotesques goes right away in his novel "Winsburgh, Ohio", his first successful one, and some may say the best in Sherwood Anderson"s works overall. In fact the book starts with the story "The Book of the Grotesque." It is about the old writer and his dream, but sets quiet an interesting and sticking boundary of relation and correlation of things around. Sherwood Anderson offers his own formula for a human, that works for almost everyone. At first Sherwood Anderson puts the old writer on the same level with common people. He does not distinguish between them, makes him a part of the crowd. "The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his life, a great many notions in his head" I could not understand what kind of notions there were, but I suppose it was the knowledge gained in life, wars, the attempts to find a new role, means of expression, attempt to find himself, as he was a writer, and a living man. Sherwood Anderson puts in the story a carpenter who came to fix writer"s bed. An important fact about him was that he was a soldier in the Civil War. "The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersoneville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation"... Probably the carpenter could never forget that experience of his imprisonment, and that feeling could not live him throughout all his life? The carpenter and the old writer are pictured almost identically, both have white mustache, both smoke, both have heavy experience of war, but that"s what built in the wall between them: the experience of war. Sherwood Anderson refers to the carpener not by his name, but calls him soldier.
The fact of a symbolic meaning is that the carpenter forgot the writer"s plan of rasing the bed and did it in his own way. There is a wall of misundersanding between the two men, don’t you think?
The next part of the story is devoted to the old writer"s dream. He had a vision, or appearance of people whom he got to know throughout his life: "He had known people, many people, known them in peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people". This text is subjective and is meant to be Anderson’s remark to the story.
The old author saw (dreamt of) people "they were all grotesques... The grotesques were not all horrible". The old man wrote a book. There he described his dream: "And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became the falsehood". The author thought of no unity with other people, but at the same time he was of no difference (relativity and corelativity of old man"s dream).
The old writer himself has the dual nature. From one side, he is the old man who is always on the edge of becoming a grotesque. From the other, there is something young inside of him. That something has protected the writer all his life.
"The Book of the Grotesque" is a prologue for the whole "Winesburgh, Ohio". It has a foreshadowing role and is somewhat akin to a set of rules that constrain the novel. Or maybe “The Book of the Grotesque” represents the current time, and the rest of “Wiensburgh, Ohio” is a flashback? What if the old author is meant under the main character of the novel? Will the book be a memories of the author? One way or another, the meaning of the stories cannot be lost. “The Book of the Grotesque” shows the outline of the whole life of a man, but also of a generation.
What is in those "hidden drives", why are they of so importance to Sherwood Anderson? As it was said earlier Sherwood Anderson was psychologist, he had an ability to see people"s inner, and what he has seen did not please him. Here and there we read about people from one village, who seem to know each other, but fail to reaveal self because of some harmful experience: Wing Biddlebaum who"s life was disfigured by men, that were full of outrage, lacked imagination and simple kindness, had to limit himself from the outer world but George Willard (who in fact became his inner). Doctor Reefy who, in his turn, was constrained by his thoughts: "one by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again... Wineburgh has forgotten the old man". It could not stand the influence, the same way doctor"s wife did not: she died.
What is a plot of the novel? Or even does it have a plot at all? There is a plot in "Winesburgh, Ohio". To speak in short there are several moments to be covered (as there are some sub plots that are worth mentioning):
The main action is going around a young newspapre man, George Willard. He is certainly a protagonist. More to say he is the one to make a choice for his future, he is the one who enters the quest.
George Willard is always under pressure of his fellow people. He is supposed to be a go-getter and everybody hopes to help him, some do that in an active way, some in passive, but all form a certain sub-plot of their own.
“Winesburgh, Ohio” is highly narrative novel. The narration, not dialogs, is the main mean of showing the atmosphere, the thoughts of characters, makes the stories bring the undercurrent out to the reader. The direct speeches show the outer world of the town people. At times they appear the only bridges between characters.
The collection of stories is always refered to as sketches. Descriptions bear the big importance in the novel. They prepare the reader to learn the implicit, involve him into the plot. Either sudden: ‘With a convulsive move of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang up his feet’... Or mysterious: ‘in the darkness George Willrd walked along the alleyway, going carefully and causciously’. Or turbid: ‘Children curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingures black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields’... Descriptions give impulses to the stories, setting tones for each.
Sketches build up the novel by overlaping each other. Pictures drawn by them have some things in common. At first, the common setting unites them into one. Then, what I consider of more value, they are built around one central figure, George Willard.
The first mention of George Willard can be met in the story "Hands": "George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the propriator of the New Willard House..."(not too much promising?). We get to learn there that he was also a reporter in Winesburgh Eagle; he had a profession that made him deal with people, and the fact that he was a sensible boy made his communication with the village easier. George Willard is intended to be sensitive: Sherwood Anderson"s language is a lot influential in its nature. It makes a reader experience the same with subjectively objective manner, the way the implicity of sketches is not seen right away. By and by a reader along with gaining experience starts to realise of the phenomenon of those stories.
Another experience of George Willard"s mother, tall and gaunt, listless and ghosty, is also of big importance. She cares about her son and is in constant fear of her husband. She is not as much affraid of Tom Willard as of his influence on George. Elizabeth is misunderstood. She is aware of her miserability, but all she longs for is that her son, George would find himself: "he is groping about, trying to find himself", she thought. "He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is a thing, it is the thing I let be killed in myself". These words of hope reveal her life, at the same time they show her attitude: though she is lost there is a chance George will not be that way. Mother plays a great role in George Willard"s life. She is the one that wants George to search for the thing she has lost. "Between Elizabeth and her son George there was deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died". Got married though Elizabeth Willard has lost a dream, became reserved, shabby, and "the communion between all and his mother was outwardly a formal thing without meaning", she cared for her son and with all her love: George was the person she was alive for.
The opposite picture is set by his dad, "Tom Willard was ambitious for his son... He wanted his son to succeed". That was all he wanted, though understood the "difference" of his son, he was thinking of himself as a Democrat (that notion took hold of him for entire days), nothing concerned him more.
George Willard, a young reporter of Winesburgh Eagle, is a central, thorough figure in the novel. He is about the only person who does not have a lost soul in Winesburgh. Sherwood Anderson chose the young man to show the problematical character of the search of "the young thing", of self. Anderson speaks about the search on the level of a human soul shows the hardships of it, implying that the search goes on not only in the head of George, but in America itself. And the analysis of George Willard can show the atmosphere in general of that time.
The ability to be a connector between people in Winesburgh is given to George by his young character that possesses "at times almost overwhelming curiosity [that] had taken hold of him". George is kind enough, that kindness keeps him from being rough to his people, "it keeps him from blurting out questions that were often in his mind". George always seems to be "perplexed and frightened upon the grassy slope". His life is full of ups and downs. The search requires that, it tunes George giving him the ultimate knowledge. But the young man is not still. He is always present. He follows and listens, affraid and scared of weird men around he is willing to listen up and give relief: "The young reporter went willingly enough... The boy was a little afraid but had never been more curious in his life... George Willard followed".
The influence George Willard receives from his fellow men at some points makes the decision for the young man. He subconsciously hurries, preparing to finaly grasp the essence,"preparing fuel for the fire". But not all influence is for good. Though some people warn him there are still ones that want to stuff George"s head with false, useless notions. Some think that young "George belongs to the town". Some are infuriated because of his ability to express:"if George Willard were here, he"d have something to say". George experiences town people. In his moment of search he appears to be with different people, tries to find common things in Enoch Robinson and Wash Williams, Dr.Reefy and Dr.Parcival, rushes about trying truths of those polypolar society.
"George Willard had a habit of talking aloud to himself". He tried to set his thoughts clear though" the desire to say words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning", he was groping about trying to find himself’. Geogre is about the only figure who is described in narrations as weel as he speaks for himself: he is about the only one who possesses both: inner and outer, in a healthy way. The young man is the most balanced figure, though he undergoes the greatest change. There was something inside of him striving to grow big. And that something did not remain unnoticed. "Kate Swift"s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In something he had written as a schoolboy she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the sparck". She saw a future writer. (...)
The young reporter posesses a transcency to be all over in town, though his physic is not there. He happened to be not only the central character, but, according to Sherwood Anderson, is a defining figure of time and space: "Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburgh all her life... when George had been for a year on the Winesburgh Eagle, four things happened to Joe Welling". The young man is of constant comparison to people, all who lived before and along with the young Willard. Sometimes it seems that comparisons, made to draw a prediction for or question the "difference" of George, tell us that his life has another destiny. One might say he was on the edge of decision of either becoming grotesque or... "George Willard has set forth upon an adventure". He knew he had to go. "I am going to get out of here", he said. "I don"t know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going away... I just want to go away and look of people and think".
The spirit of George is present throughout the whole "Winesburgh, Ohio". Sherwood Anderson makes the young Willard be a passionate witness to the life in town and that forms his personality. "George Willard listened, afire with curiosity". Young is just being born in him: "Like an exited dog, George Willard ran here and there, noting on his pad of paper". He gets amazed at facts that life throws at him, trying to think everything over, to find. Young man "had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books". Experience is drawn to George by his desires. And his biggest desire was "to say words".
The revelation to George"s quest comes in te sketch "Sophistication", when his search reaches the highest degree.
The very beginning prepairs us to something dirty, unnatural, we read about young man"s enclosure: "George Willard concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy"s office". It is the moment of inner crisis, of his sophistication, George is like a spring in a box who is ready to take a leap. He is not alone: the feeling of loneliness makes him long for a friend. "With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he preferes that the other is a woman, that is because he believes that she will be gentle, that she will understand". In the moment of spiritual downfall George turns to Helen White, that way they both gain support, gain power to stand the crisis (Helen is also undergiong the change).
The story has an interesting structure, it is a continuation and the logic end to the previous sketches, an indication of the loosing and gaining balance. It has a structure akin to the structure of a wave, an uprising and a quick downfall: At first George appears to be boastful, unnaturally fancy, tries to impress with his watered personality -> He gets tired of that fast, gets tired of boosting, of all chaotic sounds surrounding him. The scales are tilted; he views people around as "cattle confined in a pen", there is a procession of faces of ghosts not of dead, but of living people, thinks about the meaningless of life, is irritated by the outer. the tension is built up in this peak of George"s crisis. -> George and Helen go away to the countryside, they escape the roaring village to find rest. It is the moment when they gain their power, feel relief, calm down, to do that together they go back to the root of human existance. They go through a process of renewal and rebirth. At first they feel like "two oddly sensitive human atoms", then emerge into "excited little animals", the tension has gone, and now they are two "splendid young things in the the young world". Their experience is of going through those changes, of watching nature from the very beginning, of being a part of it and remembering love, understanding and reverence to the rest of the world.
One may see a thought in the lines that the nature is important component. It is certainly so. The nature gives the power to george, it teaches him about coping with the outer and restores the balance inside young man. It purifies him and installs reverence, a thing that was cut from his fellow men.
The story has a definite mixture of styles. They all work to achieve the goal of the book: to show the search. The sketch is full of symbols (when George "roled down the hill" that meant the come back of a man back to his people, that he is not lost), the projection of the development in the novel may also be treated from different points (it may have a linear, or cyclic from that shows the come back of George, but on a higher lever than he went away). All of the means show that George has found what he was looking for, he avoided from becoming a grotesque, and have taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible". He found himself.
The Conclusion.
This paper looked upon problems of the search of self. Many more of them are reflected in the novel of Sherwoon Anderson "Winesburgh, Ohio", probably, there are a lot more to be unrevealed. But the knowledge that should be taken from the work lies in the title of it: "The Search of Self". As it is shown in the research one always longs for understanding, communication, but because of some obsticles fails to establish it, poeple forget the knowledge of love and understanding so start mending walls around. The search of self is a search for a way out of that, the quest for the knowledge lost irrevocably, the quest to establish the balance between the inner and the outer in one soul, a village, a city, or even a country. The book "Wineburgh, Ohio" tells us about it on the level of a soul or even a village, reminds us of ways and means, helps us to find a place in te society, to understand, love and revere people. Sherwood Anderson has lived his life and found himself, moreover, he has done that for a lot of people with his books: returned back what was taken by the wars: spiritual, material, and physical.
The search of self, characteristic to the United states in the beginning of the XX century, is now gaining new power in today"s life of Russia as well. I think that we are to learn from the book, to grasp the very essence of it.
The search for self is the quest for "the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern life possible".
Bibliographical Reference.
1. Sherwood Anderson: “Winesburgh, Ohio”.
2. Sivachyov: “History of the United States scince WWI” / The Aftermath of the World WarI in the USA.
3. C. Henry Warren: “Sherwood Anderson”.
4. Kuznetsova: “The Literature of the United States” / Fiction scince World War I. p. 243
5. Marx: “Sociological and literary depiction of alienation”.
6. Irwing Howe: “The introduction to “Whinesburgh, Ohio”.