Winesburg, Ohio; a Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

Publisher Marketing: The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window. Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer's room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked. For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night. Contributor Bio:  Anderson, Sherwood Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and poet. A successful copywriter and business owner, Anderson's experience of a nervous breakdown precipitated his abandonment of his business and family in order to pursue a full-time writing career. Anderson went on to produce more than twenty published works in his lifetime, including the enduring short-story collection, Winesburg, Ohio, and his semi-autobiographical style served as an influence for some of the brightest writers of the succeeding generation, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe. Anderson died in 1941.