Sherwood Anderson's legacy to the American short story

Even though in his best work Sherwood Anderson took up and make his own many of the most resonant elements of the works of the nineteenth-century greats, it is what he added to that legacy which has mattered most to the writers who have read him and have learned from him. For them, he gave quintessential definition to one major form of American character, familiar but then unclarified, the grotesque. He took the story cycle and made it into a new form for the novel. Within each story he created greater psychological realism by structuring his narratives around fragments of impressions, employing ambiguous endings, laying down plotlines that rambled forward and backward in time. He also created the modern American style of poetic realism, a style distinguished by colloquial idioms, repeated phrases, the use of ordinary objects, a natural lyricism, all voiced by a particularly observant, compassionate person on the street.; Hemingway and Faulkner have been credited with salient traits of the twentieth century American story that actually came to them by way of Anderson. Scholars have mentioned the Anderson legacy in passing, citing as his beneficiaries at least twenty-five well-known authors. But except in comparisons of Winesburg, Ohio with Hemingway's In Our Time, nowhere has it been shown how the influence of Anderson reverberates through American stories right into the 1980s.; This dissertation describes two main streams of influence that emanate from Anderson. One goes through Hemingway to Raymond Carver, and defines the predominant literary style of the twentieth century American short story. That style is characterized by a journal-genuine voice employing simple syntax, direct exposition, conversational speech, and lyricism based in controlled emotional urgency. The second stream runs through Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, on to Carver again, and defines the predominant mode of characterization in the twentieth-century American short story. It discovers the grotesque in everyday life, favors a mythic sense of events, betrays a preoccupation with formalized religion as oppressive, and offers a dark view of human experience based on a profound reverence for life.