SOURCE: “‘Death in the Woods’: Sherwood Anderson's ‘Cold Pastoral’”, in College English Association Critic, Vol. 30, No. 8, May, 1968, pp. 4–5.

In the below essay, Guerin argues that “Death in the Woods” is a story about writing. The key to the story, according to Guerin, is the revelation that the narrator experiences at the sight of the woman's dead body.

Like Wordsworth's and Keats's sonnets on the sonnet, like MacLeish's “Ars Poetica,” like Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Sherwood Anderson's “Death in the Woods” seems to be among that wide and interesting mass of creative literature written about literature. Such pieces are stories, poems, or plays in themselves, while at the same time they are about literature or the creative process of writing it.

In Anderson's story, the narrator consciously tells us that he is trying to tell a story, a story that was not told well in...