Dark Laughter Summary
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which Anderson subtitled, "A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life," sketches the story of a large cast of characters; Dark Laughter, in contrast, probes the reflections of three people: Bruce Dudley, his boss Fred Grey, and Fred's wife Aline Grey.
Dudley, a dreamer and a journalist with ambitions to write something serious, feels he is going nowhere with his newspaper job in Chicago. His wife is wrapped up in her own career as a writer. One day he simply decides to reject the present and walks out of his job and marriage to return to the simple, small-town life in Old Harbor, on the Ohio River, where he had lived as a boy. He lands a job in a wheel factory owned by Fred Grey. Here he works with a seasoned hand at wheel painting named Sponge Martin. Sponge was once...
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Study Pack
The Dark Laughter Study Pack contains:
Dark Laughter Short Guide
Sherwood Anderson Biographies (6)
590 words, approx. 2 pages
The works of the American writer Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) are graced by a psychological complexity absent from earlier American fiction. His stories stress character and mood, and his style is la...
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5,201 words, approx. 18 pages
On the last day of February, 1941, at age 64, Sherwood Anderson set off on a new adventure: he and his fourth wife, Eleanor Copenhaver, sailed on the Santa Lucia on a goodwill mission to South America...
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1,230 words, approx. 5 pages
Sherwood Anderson visited Paris twice during his life; once in 1921 and once in 1926-1927. Each trip lasted only a few months and, of the two, the first was by far the more important. Indeed, the seco...
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8,672 words, approx. 29 pages
Although Sherwood Anderson is not one of the major figures in twentieth-century American literature, he is for several reasons a writer of very considerable significance. At his best in short fictio...
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14,764 words, approx. 50 pages
Sherwood Anderson, now regarded as one of the most important American writers in the short-story form, was born to Irwin McLain Anderson and Emma Smith in Camden, Ohio, on 13 September 1876 and raised...
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9,770 words, approx. 33 pages
Biography EssayAlthough Sherwood Anderson is not one of the major figures in twentieth-century American literature, he is for several reasons a writer of very considerable significance. At his best in...
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Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson