Simple Storie's

Simple Stories

DEATH in THE WOODS AND OTHER STORIES--Sherwood Anderson--Live right

Sherwood Anderson never wrote a good novel, but he has written some first-rate short stories. His bumbling, fumbling, earnest-zany style wanders all over the place when it comes to telling a long narrative: confined to briefer limits it is often a powerful plodder. Though none of the 16 stories in Death in the Woods is the equal of his justly famed "I'm a Fool," three of them are well up to Anderson standard; one ("The Fight") is not only good but (what is even rarer for Author Anderson) funny.

"Death in the Woods," plotless, atmospheric, describes the memory of finding an old woman frozen to death in the snow. '"The Return" tells how a man came back to his home town years later, and how he was glad to run away from it the same night. In "The Fight" two respectable, middle-aged cousins who have never liked each other finally have the fistfight they should have got out of their systems when they were boys. Having given and received a black eye, a bloody nose, they part in silent enmity. "John thought his cousin Alfred never had been very nice. He hoped the punches he had got in on Alfred's body would make him so sore that in the morning on the train he would be unable to get out of his berth."

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