The modern writer

by Sherwood Anderson

And now, men and women, I am afraid you will think me an ill-natured fellow. I have spent so large a part of my allotted time here in speaking of what in my opinion is tending to make writing in America so bad. It doesn’t seem right. I must remember that I am from Chicago—a highly cultured center, surely—and that in Chicago we have a motto. Our city mayor got it up several years ago, and for a year or two it was plastered about everywhere on the walls and billboards of the city. “Put away your hammer and get out your horn,” it said.

Now I shall try to do that.

There is, you see, a modern movement in America. We are not so self-satisfied as we must often seem to strangers, to men from foreign parts. We still walk about and talk things over among ourselves. There is, if you are sensitive enough to feel it, a wistful something in the air here. You will feel it in any large crowd. At present the Modern Movement is perhaps a groping ill-defined movement but it exists. In painting there are a number of men who have stopped making pleasant enough drawings of the old swimming hole and the magazine cover lady, who have thrown overboard the tricks of realism and representation and the absorption in surface technique and who are trying to bring feeling and form back into painting. The same thing is going on in the writing of poetry. Architecture is freeing itself from imitation of dead impulses and is taking new life.

In prose the movement is expressing itself in a growing number of men who are really trying to be honest to the materials in which they work.

Let me explain what I mean by that, if I can.

I think you will all agree with me that in an older day in America, when a great majority of the men who worked in the crafts, the blacksmiths, silversmiths, shoemakers, harness makers, saddle makers, builders of vehicles, furniture, etc., worked in small shops, with a few apprentices to help, there was a feeling in the workman that later was pretty much destroyed.

The factory came and swept the individual workman aside and with him went much of the old workman’s feeling toward tools and materials.

The workman in the Ford factory, for example, has nothing at all to do with his tools or the materials in which he works. His own individual feeling toward tools and materials is ruthlessly suppressed. Individual reaction to tools and materials is simply not wanted. What is wanted is a highly standardized product turned out at a low manufacturing cost.

The hand of standardization is laid upon the workman in the factories as I have tried to show you how it is being laid upon the workman in prose who wants also to live on the expensive scale of the banker or the broker.

I have tried to show you here that the popular magazines are but factories for efficient standardization of the minds of people for the purpose of serving the factories. I think they do not really pretend to be anything else.