Quest for community.

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 1, by Walter B. Rideout (Wisconsin, 852 pp., $60)

'Like all real American men of our day I wander constantly from place to place striving to put down roots into the American soil and not quite doing it," wrote Sherwood Anderson in his memoir A Story Teller's Story, over 80 years ago. The often-thwarted desire to put down roots--in a particular place or into a firm sense of understanding life--along with the failure to maintain lifelong friendships within longstanding communities is to some extent the story of modern American life itself; hence the subtitle, "A Writer in America," to Walter B. Rideout's long-awaited biography of Anderson.

This is an ambitious and rigorously researched work, which has been some 45 years in the writing. Rideout, professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin, has provided what amounts to a month-by-month recounting of his subject's life. Owing to the exhaustive detail the biographer provides, and the eloquence of his prose, the book succeeds as the definitive biography of Anderson; it will be the touchstone of all future Anderson scholarship. This first volume covers Anderson's ancestry and early years through his long stint as an advertising copywriter and independent businessman, to his period of highest achievement as a writer of fiction, and on to age 50, a point at which most of his important work was behind him.

Anderson (1876-1941) is best known as the author of the bittersweet Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of thematically connected short stories that form a narrative of village life in gaslight America, and is a staple of high-school English programs. He wrote much else besides, including a clutch of masterful short stories ("I Want to Know Why," "A Meeting South," "The Man Who Became a Woman," "Death in the Woods," and "I'm a Fool," among others), and several novels, perhaps the best of these being Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925). Much of his fiction reflects life in the small-town Midwest as that region changed with the coming of the industrial age and mass production.

A native of small-town Ohio, Anderson was the son of a ne'er-do-well, yarn-spinning Civil War veteran and a long-sacrificing mother who, he claimed, taught him "to see beneath the surface of lives." Rideout depicts him as an individual troubled by the effects of industrialism and urbanization upon man and culture, who carried within him the memory of stories told by men and women who remembered fondly the agrarian past. But the biographer also stresses that Anderson was far from being merely a regionalist or simply nostalgic: By his simple style, his emphasis upon incident and insight into character (rather than the conventions of plot), and his examination of the themes of spiritual lostness and sexual yearning, he exercised a profound effect upon 20th-century American literature in general. Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner, and a host of others owe an unmistakable debt to Anderson. The essence of that influence can be found in words he wrote two years before Winesburg appeared: "As I walk alone, an old truth comes home to me and I know that we shall never have an American literature until we return to faith in ourselves and to the facing of our own limitations. We must, in some way, become in ourselves more like our fellows, more simple and real."

Anderson was thus one of the progenitors of modernist realism in American literature. Rideout notes the influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein on Anderson, and points out that "with him realism was a means to something else, not an end in itself.... What is important is 'to see beneath the surface of lives,' to perceive the intricate mesh of impulses, desires, drives growing down in the dark, unrevealed parts of the personality, like the complex mass of roots that, below the surface of the ground, feeds the common grass above in the light."

Beneath the surface of lives, Anderson found much emptiness and confusion, along with the dual belief--which he ascribed to Puritanism--that sexuality is shameful and that the sum of a person's possessions is a sure indicator of his human worth. He once wrote: "In spite of all our mechanical progress in America, our swift easy-going from place to place, we Americans are essentially a lonely people." He spoke of the cultural rootlessness brought about by the new, fast-paced business world, with its contempt for craftsmanship and disdain for permanence and imagination. No longer possessing the certainties of the past, Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been taken from a slow-paced, largely agricultural past of rootedness within established communities of faith and friendship, and thrust into a bustling world of appearance over substance, where the cash nexus had been elevated to the highest value of human existence.

In the world as Anderson saw it, men and women had been rendered grotesque by the secret loneliness of their lives: Lacking both fellowship with each other and a sense of the transcendent, they groped for understanding and love, feeling that something vital had been lost. In a sense Anderson was the Midwest's answer to Henry Adams, whose Education of Henry Adams (1918) fascinated him. Rideout notes that although differing in background "both men nevertheless record attempts to understand an American culture and civilization in which they have not been adequately prepared to live, with major elements of which they are profoundly unsympathetic, within which they seek to find both work that fully expresses the self and an inner order that effectually defends the self against outer chaos."

Rideout portrays Anderson as a fascinating, complex man, forever taking a backward glance toward the preindustrial American Republic of his youth while looking forward hopefully toward a recovery of the past's better aspects. Anderson had many contradictions: Admirable for his generosity and the premium he put on friendship, he could also be vain and ungrateful. He was at once a hail-fellow-well-met friend of the common man and an individual who saw himself as above the common herd, something of an artiste and thus outside America's cultural mores, notably marriage. (As at least three of his four wives discovered in time, the man of genius--real or self-imagined--is in far more need of a mother than a wife.)

Sylvia Beach, of the renowned Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, met Anderson in the 1920s and found him "a mixture of poet and evangelist (without the preaching), with perhaps a touch of the actor. Anyhow ... a most interesting man." The "touch of the actor" was a skill learned during his many years as an advertising representative, when it was essential to maintain a certain benign facade, keeping his true thoughts cloaked. Thus Anderson was able to maintain cordial relations with fellow Midwesterner Sinclair Lewis, although his letters to friends indicate Anderson's intense jealousy of the success enjoyed by the author of Main Street. Likewise, Anderson sought to have his short stories published in the magazines The Smart Set and The American Mercury, edited by H. L. Mencken, and he enjoyed Mencken's reviews praising his books; but he privately considered the Sage of Baltimore "a rather naive stupid man after all. One can't take him really seriously."

In these and thousands of other telling details, Rideout's book is a treasure trove of information on Anderson. A few minor oversights have slipped through; for example, in two places the title of one of Anderson's best-known Winesburg stories, "The Untold Lie," is given as "The Untold Life." But for the most part, Rideout displays a truly astonishing command of every detail surrounding Anderson and his milieu, including his influence on other writers who are today better known. In some cases, Anderson's counsel to and influence upon the rising generation of writers were received gratefully; in other cases less so. Hemingway ruthlessly mocked Anderson in his parody The Torrents of Spring (1926). Faulkner gently satirized Anderson as the garrulous storyteller Dawson Fairchild in his own early novel, Mosquitoes (1927). Both Hemingway and Faulkner later regretted needling Anderson in these novels, perceiving that their works had been taken by him not as the exercises in all-in-good-fun literary roughhousing they had intended, but as betrayals of friendship.

A few years before he died, Faulkner looked back on Anderson with respect, telling an interviewer for The Paris Review, "He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation." The appearance of Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America indicates that at long last Anderson's proper evaluation has arrived.

Mr. Person is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mindand Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow.