SOURCE: “‘Death in the Woods’ and the Artist's Self in Sherwood Anderson,” in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 76, No. 3, June, 1959, pp. 306–11.

In the following essay, Lawry argues that “Death in the Woods” is concerned with the self, the artistic imagination and creative act, and the narrator's creation of meaning.

Sherwood Anderson's autobiographical works attest his continuing absorption with the incidents and the form of his short story “Death in the Woods.”¹ In his Memoirs he says that he tried to write the story “a dozen times over as many years.”² It appears in a tentative early version in Tar.³ Many of its episodes are used in a seldom-read fragment entitled “Father Abraham,” which supposedly developed the life of Lincoln; indeed, the story's materials occupy a dominant position in that strange, often autobiographical work.⁴ Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 310–312), he relates the incident of the dogs'...