The modern writer

BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
SAN FRANCISCO + MCMXXV THE LANTERN PRESS GELBER, LILIENTHAL, INC. COPYRIGHT MCMXXV
FTER 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.
In America the writer is faced with a situation that is unique. Our country is vast. In it are to be found so many different conditions of life, so many different social traditions that the writer who attempts to express in his work something national is in an almost impossible position. At best, as yet, he can only snatch at fragments. California is 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 little afraid of each other. Time only can weld us together, make us one people, make us understand each other. And in understanding alone is the real love of comrades, that is the beginning of a real love of our country.
Now I am an American writer and I have been by critics in general classed among that rather vague group known as the Moderns. I have set myself 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 in my nature a teller of tales, not a preacher, and I have been told that in trying to address any considerable number of people on a large subject it is a mistake to try to cover too much ground, that the writer should confine himself to the making of a few points, but how I am to do that on such a subject as Modernism I do not know. As a matter of fact I have, within the last year, written a book on the subject, a book called A Story Teller’s Story and in it there are I believe something like a hundred and thirty thousand words. Now that the book, half a tale, 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. There are so many things I shall not succeed in getting said, even in a large book.