LETTERS OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Mr. Jones has chosen wisely and well among the 5000 odd letters of Sherwood Anderson in the Newberry Library. The letters here begin in 1916, when Anderson was 40 and had given up his business to start writing in earnest. There is little of Anderson's personal life, or his four marriages, since these letters have been selected to orient the ""prophet of the middle West"" in his complete context as a twentieth century writer. Anderson carried on a voluminous correspondence with Van Wyck Brooks, Horace Liveright, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Edmund Wilson, and a score of striving young writers. Some of the letters read like short stories or fragments from his novels; all are characterized by his rather exalted diction and salutations, and serve to fortify the editor's contention that Anderson ""stands at the Fountainhead of American modernism"". A book for a permanent- rather than immediate- sale, as a background of American literature.