Album for a Classic

SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S MEMOIRS-Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

The peculiar and important thing about this new, and conspicuously informal, American classic is that it belongs far less to the literate reader than to those who read so little that talk can still mean more to them than print-provided it be plain and friendly, sensible talking. For Sherwood Anderson's life story has many things in common with their own, and so has his way of telling it.

His mother, in her girlhood, was bonded-out to an Ohio farmer. Sherwood and his sister and his brothers were deeply poor children of an irresponsible father. In his early 20s he enlisted and served a tame, funny, delightfully told few weeks in the Spanish-American War. In his hunger for money, he also developed an Alger-boy slickness which he was later to regret; worked at odd-jobs, with race horses, in factories, writing advertising copy; became at length a paint manufacturer and the respectable head of a respectable family.

His descriptions of business, of businessmen's pleasures, of the terrible restiveness and staleness which all but broke him before he ultimately broke loose, are among the most extraordinary pages in the book -sketchy, fumbling, yet incomparably more penetrating and more compassionate than, say, the excellent Babbitt. It was only after he walked out on his wife, his children and his business that his life as a writer began. His account of that life is no less moving, but it lacks the great human breadth of the first half of his story.

For anyone who cares to clarify his faith in a nation, and in human beings, the book will be an eminent pleasure to read. It is not within miles of faultlessness; it is not the kind of book that tries to be. It is as placidly worked as a cow works her cud, and naive enough, sometimes, to make that cow smile; but the book contains some of the gentlest, most beautiful writing about American living that has ever been done. For though Anderson, as he says, was "but a minor figure," he is no less significant and symbolic an American than Abraham Lincoln, no less deeply bred of the humane earth, and of common people.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.