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THE MODERN
WRITER

BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

SAN FRANCISCO + MCMXXV
THE LANTERN PRESS
GELBER, LILIENTHAL, INC.

COPYRIGHT MCMXXV

THE MODERN WRITER

BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

FTER ALL it is not very strange that we in America have been a longtime coming to the beginning of something like a national literature.Nations are not made in a short time and we Americans have been tryingto make rather a large nation. In a compact small country in which forhundreds of years the same people have lived, slowly building uptraditions, telling old tales, singing old songs, the story teller orthe poet has something in{1} which he can rest. People grown old, as apeople, on the same land, through which old rivers flow, looking out forgenerations 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 sonfollowing in the footsteps of a father dreams old dreams. The landitself 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 yearspeople of one blood have been born, have lived, suffered, had moments ofhappiness and have died.

In America the writer is faced with a situation that is unique. Ourcountry is vast. In it are to be found so many different conditions oflife, so many different social traditions that the writer who attemptsto express in his work something national is in an almost impossibleposition. At best, as yet, he can{2} only snatch at fragments. Californiais not Maine. North Dakota is not Louisiana. Ohio is not North Carolina.We are as yet strangers to each other. We are all of us just a littleafraid of each other. Time only can weld us together, make us onepeople, make us understand each other. And in understanding alone is thereal love of comrades, that is the beginning of a real love of ourcountry.

Now I am an American writer and I have been by critics in generalclassed among that rather vague group known as the Moderns. I have setmyself here to speak to you on the subject of modern American writing.The whole business of expressing definite opinions is new to me. I am inmy nature a teller of tales, not a preacher, and I have been told thatin trying to address any considerable number of people on a largesubject it is a mistake to try to cover too much ground, that the writershould{3} confine himself to the making of a few points, but how I am todo that on such a subject as Modernism I do not know. As a matter offact I have, within the last year, written a book on the subject, a bookcalled A Story Teller’s Story and in it there are I believe somethinglike a hundred and thirty thousand words. Now that the book, half atale, half an attempt to put down certain notions of my own, is written,I look forward eagerly to the getting of my hands on the proofs. Thereare so many things I shall not succeed in getting said, even in a largebook.

As everyone knows, there is in the world at this time what is broadlytermed a Modern movemen

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THE MODERN
WRITER