SOURCE: Wixson, Douglas. “Sherwood Anderson and the Midwestern Literary Radicalism in the 1930s.” Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 28-39.

In the following essay, Wixson explores Anderson's place in the literary political landscape of the 1930s in the United States.

“We are in the new age. Welcome, men, women and children into           the new age. Will you accept it? Will you go into the factories to work? Will you quit having contempt for those who work in the           factories?” 

—Sherwood Anderson, “Machine Song: Automobile”¹

In the course of exploring a group of writers who contributed to little magazines published in Moberly, Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Peoria, and other Midwestern towns during the 1930s I discovered, not surprisingly, that Sherwood Anderson's name was invoked, sometimes deprecatingly but more often appreciatively. Critics and literary historians of the 1930s tend to gather the work of writers on the left whose subject-matter involved working-class people into...