Death in the Woods

Widely regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, Sherwood Anderson was born in the small town of Camden, Ohio in 1876. To help his family of nine make ends meet, Anderson left school at the age of 14 and worked several blue-collar jobs throughout his adolescence, earning the experience he would later utilize to work his way up in the advertising profession. However, after enduring a severe mental breakdown in 1912, likely due to overwork, Anderson chose to abandon his business and pursue his lifelong passion for writing full-time. He was prolific and composed across genres throughout his literary career, publishing short stories, novels, poems, and essays. No doubt shaped by Modernist contemporaries like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is perhaps the best-known of all Anderson’s work. This collection of interconnected stories about a fictional Midwestern town influenced an array of prominent American writers through the years, including William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ray Bradbury. With so much of Anderson’s writing set against the rural Midwestern backdrop he knew so intimately, his version of the Midwest often adopts the role of a character itself, variably representing the plights, desires, fears, and dreams of those living in the region. Anderson passed away in 1941 at the age of 64 and was laid to rest in Marion, Virginia, where his epitaph reads, “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”

The late 19th and early 20th-century periods saw waves of industrial development and expansion across America, but they were also periods of time charged by working-class instability and disillusionment, sociocultural shifts, war, and unrest within the agricultural sphere. Many rural communities felt they had been left behind in the era of industrialization, as more and more jobs eventually moved away from those rural areas and shifted into urban regions. Of course, this period of time also coincides with the rise of the Modernist literary movement, which generated some of the most influential authors of the modern age. At their core, Modernist writers were responding to a world that was changing more rapidly each day, attempting to make sense of what it meant to be alive in a time so rife with uncertainty, loss, and hardship. As such, common literary techniques among Modernists came to reflect this seemingly perpetual state of the “unknown,” such as the use of fragmented or disjointed narratives, ambiguity, and the employment of the unreliable narrator. The narrator in “Death in the Woods” and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway are both strong examples of ambiguous and unreliable narration from this period, as both men boldly question the truth throughout their respective tales—a classic marker of modernist skepticism and narrative experimentation.

Arguably Sherwood Anderson’s most celebrated novel, Winesburg, Ohio comprises interrelated short stories loosely focused on protagonist George Willard as he comes of age in a small, fictional Ohioan town through the early 20th century. Much as “Death in the Woods” pays tribute to the tragic life experiences of a lower-class woman isolated from community, warmth, and belonging, Winesburg also presents a character study of a lonely, working-class Midwesterner’s  life around the turn of the century. Both firmly Modernist works, these stories exemplify their characters’ increasing dissatisfaction and disillusionment with life in the rural, pre-industrialized, and post-WWI region. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), though ultimately a science fiction work, is another novel that would likely be highly enjoyable for someone who appreciates “Death in the Woods” and Anderson’s writing in general. Bradbury, another Modernist, famously held Anderson in high regard, regularly citing him as a prominent creative influence. He admitted that Winesburg had such a profound impact on him as a writer that he subconsciously adapted its general structure and themes to the science fiction genre while he wrote Martian; upon finishing Winesburg, he is said to have exclaimed, “Oh god, wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I could write a book as good as this but put it on the planet Mars?” Bradbury was also deeply influenced by John Steinbeck, another major American author who credits Anderson as one of his foremost literary inspirations.