The Modern Writer

The Modern Writer by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson opens by observing that America has been slow to develop a national literature because the country is too vast and varied, its people too unfamiliar with one another, for the shared soil and tradition that nourish literature in older, smaller nations. He identifies himself as a writer classed among the "Moderns" and sets out to explain what that movement means and what conditions the American writer faces, noting he has already treated the subject at length in his book A Story Teller's Story. He traces American intellectual life to its New England origin: a Puritan culture that, living on cold, unproductive land, turned inward toward preparing for life after death rather than living fully in the present. This produced a literature obsessed with gentility and respectability, in which characters were sorted into "good" virgins and "bad" adventuresses, and virtue was always rewarded with wealth and marriage. Meanwhile, the actual American population was being formed by immigrants of many bloods—Italians, Greeks, southern Slavs, Jews, Celts, Spaniards, Mexicans—whose temperaments had nothing to do with Puritan restraint. He notes that Whitman, though recognized abroad as America's great poet, has not displaced the "second rate" Longfellow in the schools, and that the Adamses' aristocratic strain still outweighs Lincoln's democratic one in political thought. Anderson then describes the postwar industrial revolution that turned America from an agricultural nation into the world's leading industrial power almost overnight, bringing standardization: factories need mass demand for uniform products, so advertising grew, and with it the mass-circulation magazine, itself essentially an advertising vehicle. Yet standardized readers cannot be fully standardized in their inner lives, so magazines need writers to hold attention—commercializing the craft. The "successful" writer becomes a skilled entertainer producing the sensation of feeling without ever truly touching real lives, since offending any segment of a huge, heterogeneous audience is commercially dangerous. He compares this to a county-fair spun-sugar candy machine: a pound of sugar inflated into a bushel of insubstantial fluff. Such writers can earn enormous sums, live lavishly, and yet contribute nothing lasting to the art. He contrasts this with the older craftsman's relation to tools and materials, lost when factories replaced small shops—illustrated by the Ford assembly-line worker who has no personal stake in his materials, unlike the boys who rebuild secondhand Fords into graceful "Bugs" purely from aesthetic impulse. For Anderson, the true writer's materials are human lives, and to twist them cheaply for plot or effect is as ignoble as betraying a friend or lover. The Modern Movement, as he defines it, is workmen everywhere—painters, poets, architects, prose writers—struggling to reclaim honest control over their tools and materials against the pressure of standardization. He acknowledges the practical difficulty: real work often requires the writer to earn a living elsewhere (advertising, house painting, reporting) to buy time free from magazine demands, citing Mark Twain's observation in Life on the Mississippi that writers eventually give audiences what they want rather than what they think and feel—though Anderson believes this is now less true, as puritanism weakens and a discriminating public for honest books and painting grows, aided by pioneers like Whitman and Dreiser, and painters and critics such as Stieglitz, Marin, Rosenfeld, and Cheney. He insists that lasting satisfaction lies only in genuine devotion to craft, not in money or success, and that writers who sell out suffer privately even amid public acclaim. He urges young writers with talent to earn their living by any honest means necessary rather than compromise their work, arguing Americans are fundamentally generous toward artists, even to the point of indulging pretenders. He closes by noting there is no fixed agreement among artists about method or form—quoting "A. E." that a literary movement is merely several talented men who cordially hate each other—and affirms that the real reward of the craft lies in the endless, unfinishable work itself.

By Sherwood Anderson · First published 1925 · Genre: Literary Essay, Literary Criticism, Manifesto · 7,729 words

First lines

After all it is not very strange that we in America have been a long time coming to the beginning of something like a national literature. Nations are not made in a short time and we Americans have been trying to make rather a large nation. In a compact small country in which for hundreds of years the same people have lived, slowly building up traditions, telling old tales, singing old songs, the story teller or the poet has something in which he can rest. People grown old, as a people, on the same land, through which old rivers flow, looking out for generations upon the same great plains and up into the same mountains, come to know each other in an intimate way unknown to us here. The son following in the footsteps of a father dreams old dreams. The land itself whispers to him. Stories are in the very air about the writer. They spring up out of the soil on which for many hundreds of years people of one blood have been born, have lived, suffered, had moments of happiness and have died.

What this Textopian page supports

The Modern Writer is listed on Textopian as an essay by Sherwood Anderson, dated 1925 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

American literature · Modernism · Essay · Literary criticism · Artistic integrity · Commercialization of art · Craftsmanship · Standardization · Mass media · Puritanism · Industrial revolution · Literary quality

More by Sherwood Anderson