ANDERSON, Sherwood (1876-1941). Mid-American Chants. New York: John Lane, 1918.
ANDERSON, Sherwood (1876-1941). Mid-American Chants. New York: John Lane, 1918.

細節
ANDERSON, Sherwood (1876-1941). Mid-American Chants. New York: John Lane, 1918.

8o. Original yellow cloth, stamped in green, brown and gilt (spine lightly faded); printed dust jacket (some wear along edges and spine, few tears reinforced on verso). Provenance: Tennessee Mitchell, the author's second wife (presentation inscription).

FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY ANDERSON TO HIS SECOND WIFE on the front free endpaper: "To Tennesee Mitchell. Sherwood Anderson." Mitchell was the second of Anderson's four wives, wedding her in 1916 shortly after his divorce from Cornelia Lane Anderson. In that same year, his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published. Marching Men, his second novel, was published in 1917. Anderson's marriage to Tennessee was not a success, and in 1922 he left Chicago for New York, then Reno, Nevada. After his divorce in 1924, he married Elizabeth Prall, and they moved to New Orleans.

Anderson was largely self-educated and began writing while working in advertising. He despised business ethics and in 1912 suffered an amnesic nervous breakdown, leading him to walk out on his family and his job managing a paint factory. He recovered and returned to advertising work, soon becoming acquainted with the other writers in the Chicago Group, notably Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. Anderson writes of his early philosophy in the Foreword (repeated on the dust jacket): "I do not believe that my people of mid-western America, immersed as we are in affairs, hurried and harried through life by the terrible engine--industrialism--have come to the time of song. To me that song belongs with and has its birth in the memory of older things than we know..."