Feature article
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Festival celebrates Sherwood Anderson's life, influence in Virginia
By Jessica Fischer
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It was Southwest Virginia’s cool climate, low cost of living and, perhaps, the prayers of a hard-working farm wife that prompted famed novelist Sherwood Anderson to leave behind the oppressive heat of New Orleans in the summer of 1925 and catch a train to Troutdale, Va.
There, Anderson and his wife took a bedroom at a farmhouse belonging to Caroline Greear, whose family had fallen upon hard times and was desperately seeking boarders.
“Mr. Anderson would have been surprised had he known that I always looked upon his coming to Virginia and to us as an answer to as heartfelt a prayer as I had ever prayed in my life,” Greear later wrote.
Turns out, the hard-working people Anderson met while vacationing in Grayson County that summer would leave an equally lasting impression on him as well.
Anderson, the author of “Winesburg, Ohio,” liked the area so much that he bought a farm there and purchased two small weekly newspapers in nearby Marion, which he ran until his son Robert officially took them over in 1932.
“When he’d been in New York, he was running with HL Mencken and Stark Young in a world of pill parties and struggling writers,” said Pat Hatfield, director of the Smyth-Bland Regional Library. “When he moved here, he saw people struggling just to survive. All of a sudden, he took a different focus as far as the need to really help these people and shed some kind of light on their plight.”
Anderson’s years in Southwest Virginia and his influence on the early modernist movement in both art and literature are the focus of the upcoming Sherwood Anderson Festival, which begins Sept. 10 and continues through January with exhibits, lectures, musical events, dramatic presentations and tours of Ripshin farm, Anderson’s mountain retreat and his monument at Round Hill.
Even after Anderson married Eleanor Copenhaver, the daughter of a local educator, in 1933 and the couple began traveling more extensively, they still considered Southwest Virginia their home.
The Andersons returned to Rosemont, Eleanor’s home in Marion, and Ripshin, Sherwood’s home in Troutdale, until the writer died of peritonitis in a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone on March 8, 1941.
Eleanor brought her husband’s body back to Marion, where he was buried in Round Hill Cemetery. She was laid to rest beside him after her death in 1985.
The Sherwood Anderson Festival’s roots reach back to 1976, the centennial of Anderson’s birth, when a short story contest was organized to honor his memory and to encourage other writers interested in the same themes of small-town life that absorbed Anderson.
Sharon McCrumb was a contest winner back in the ‘80s.
“But there was a group that kept saying we needed to enlarge the festival and incorporate all of the artists that were Sherwood’s very, very close friends, and he had so many different types of artist friends — sculptors, jewelry makers,” Hatfield said.
This year’s event, co-hosted by the folks at the library and the William King Regional Arts Center, does just that. Visitors can explore Anderson’s ties to artists Edward Hopper, Wharton Esherick and J.J. Lankes as well as writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck.
“The story is, he was great friends with Gertrude Stein, and he helped Ernest Hemingway sort of be discovered,” Hatfield said. “Then Hemingway turned on Sherwood, so the big feud between Stein and Hemingway was actually over Sherwood.
“I think the more we read about him, the more fascinated we are with what a visionary he was. He really was on the cutting edge of the literary movement away from short story writers like O’Henry into the more stream of consciousness modern story that is more character driven.”
The festival will begin at 9 a.m., Sept. 10 with the opening of the Sherwood Anderson Exhibit, featuring some of the writer’s first-edition books, manuscript pages, letters, photos and the typewriter he took on the S.S. Santa Lucia to Chile, at the Smyth-Bland Regional Library.
At 9:45 a.m., noted Anderson authority Jock Scott will present a lecture on the writer’s New Orleans years, and at 1 p.m., an opening reception will be held for the “Sherwood Anderson and the American Modernists” exhibit at William King.
The winners of this year’s Sherwood Anderson Short Story Awards will be honored at 1:15 p.m. during a luncheon at Hungry Mother State Park in Marion.
Other events slated for September include a Sherwood Anderson birthday celebration from noon to 5 p.m., Sept. 13 at the Smyth-Bland Regional Library; dramatic readings by Quinn Hawkesworth and Richard Bowden at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 14 at the Lincoln Theatre in Marion and at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 15 at Virginia Highlands Community College; a marimba concert featuring Rebecca Kite at 3 p.m., Sept. 18 at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon; a lecture by Esherick’s granddaughter, Halsey Bascom, at 7 p.m., Sept. 22 at the Smyth-Bland Regional Library; and tours of several sites with ties to Anderson, including Ripshin Farm, which is now privately owned.
For a complete schedule or more information, call the Smyth-Bland Regional Library at 276-783-2323, ext. 22 or visit sherwoodandersonfestival.com on the Net.
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