A story teller's story - Sherwood Anderson

TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ,
who has been more than father to so many
puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this
big, noisy, growing and groping America, this
book is gratefully dedicated.

Portions of this book have been published in the American Mercury, Century and Phantasmus and to these magazines the author makes due acknowledgment.

CONTENTS.

BOOK ONE	[3]
BOOK TWO	[131]
BOOK THREE	[287]
BOOK FOUR	[345]
EPILOGUE	[411]

A Story Teller’s Story

A STORY-TELLER’S STORY

IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.

My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker.

There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons with him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were, from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself were helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on a particular road became to him as important a matter as the selection of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it.