Sherwood Anderson--Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Considered one of the earliest works of modernism, this collection of short stories is structured around the childhood and adolescence of protagonist George Willard who grows up in the small Ohio town of Winesburg.  Loosely based on Anderson’s own childhood in Clyde, Ohio, George wants to be a writer, and to that end writes for the town’s newspaper office, whose mission is to include as many names of locals in each issue.  The final story of the collection sees George leave Winesburg for the big city.

Each story follows a different character, and over the course of the collection a sense of the town’s character as well as the changes it undergoes over time emerges, as it takes place during a period characterized by “a sudden and almost universal turning from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines.”  While there is a certain romanticism present in many of these stories—or rather, romance, with so many stories following couples in the dark—there is also a certain frankness to these romances, as young men and women both succumb to physical desire, with few long-term ramifications other than emotional confusion and yearning.  Several men experience homoerotic desire, desire which is shunned and marked as wrong by the larger community, but the very presentation of such desire is quite startling in a text from 1919.

The collection is characterized as a collection of “grotesques,” and opens with a story of an old writer who leaves his bead in order to capture a sense of the parade of figures he seems to be haunted with in his old age, figure of all of the people he had ever known who in his head had become grotesques: “The grotesques were not all horrible.  Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness.”  Claiming to have read this unpublished collection of grotesques and have it “made an indelible impression on my mind,” the author then proceeds to write such a collection.  The word “grotesque” here highlights the very selective and stylized nature not only of Anderson’s own writing, but of the nature of writing in general.  In keeping with the larger themes which would become so important in the works of high modernism, in which authors experimented with forms in an attempt to make a real connection, to more fully convey a human experience, Anderson early on identifies the difficulty (and potential futility) in any such attempt.  By rejecting any larger theme of plot or narrative for instead this collection of stories and characterizations, Anderson creates a very real and believable community.

Bobbie Ann Mason--Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)

In the title story, the coexisting layers of history have different meanings to different characters.  History—a connection to a sense of larger forces--is seen in opposition to ordinary life.  The events which are most important to people’s lives are not necessarily mapped onto history.

In “Third Monday,” the last story in this collection, a character observes that, “The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life” (226).  However, what this collection of stories show is that despite all of these changes, life is still full of the mysteries of life, love, and death.  What the twentieth century has in fact done is bring about enough change that the old answers—marriage until death do us part, job loyalty, and unshakeable job and family loyalty—are no longer dependable.

The collection contains several of Mason’s most anthologized stories, including the title story and “Residents and Transients.”  In “Shiloh,” truck driver Leroy is home on disability leave, which has thrown his marriage to Norma Jean off-balance.  Home again, Leroy sees the changes to his small Kentucky town, changes which he missed when he was on the road.  Unable to adapt, Leroy and Norma Jean take a trip to Shiloh, the Civil War battle site (and location of his mother-in-law’s honeymoon).  It’s at Shiloh that Norma Jean announces that she wants to leave Leroy. 

In what some critics refer to as “Kmart realism,” these stories depict a South (usually Western Kentucky) in which old referents—such as Shiloh—have lost their mythic hold, and characters struggle (with varying degrees of success) to find new symbols and traditions.  This is a South where children are used to divorce and adults buy pot in the Kmart parking lot; women undergo chemo for breast cancer; and family ties become complicated and are forced to stretch.  People marry outsiders and leave Kentucky, and the outside world invades the small towns and farming communities.  Despite all of this, however, Mason leaves the reader with the impression that the famous sense of place of the South will remain, though it might mutate.  Ultimately, she seems to come down on the side of family as the fundamental source of the South, as the ties between people are what she highlights again and again in these stories.  In Mason’s South, the farm may be gone, but the ties of family to the land cannot be undone.