"The Egg" (1920)

Read story by Sherwood Anderson online.

Sherwood Anderson is one of the most singular story writers I know, operating seemingly by his own rules, known only to him. Here he takes what is basically an anecdote, however poignant, and infuses it to bursting with portent and meaning around "the egg." There is not really any one egg in this story, though a single egg is involved in the anecdote, possibly. It's not entirely clear that's what's intended by the title. Instead, Anderson takes the idea of "egg," expands it to chickens, and packs the story full of both. It's a veritable Easter day event. The first-person narrator (we never learn his name) was raised on a chicken farm, where among other things his father kept and preserved in jars the deformed chicks that hatched there, with five legs or two heads and such, "nature's mistakes" let's call them (shown at county fairs in this story, and still seen at state fair sideshows too). He describes his father's bald head in egg-like terms. He mentions a story about Christopher Columbus and eggs. After the farm failed the narrator's family moved to town and opened a restaurant. The restaurant is where we reach the real Sherwood Anderson territory. The narrator's father is a classic Anderson character, possessed of dreams he can't begin to articulate. In this case, his dream is to create a place, the restaurant, where young people want to come and hang out. But he works the nightshift at the restaurant, which largely caters to train travelers from a nearby station. When a young person finally shows up one night, the narrator's father attempts to charm him with barroom magic tricks involving an egg—making it stand on one end (this is where Columbus comes up), and then, when that fails, attempting to steam it with vinegar to enable it to slip into a narrow-necked bottle. The boy doesn't know what to do about this strange restaurant cook, and ends by laughing at him on his way out the door. In that moment, the narrator's father finally has a glimpse of how pathetic he is, and is devastated. Well, it's all primo Anderson, as weird as it is effective in execution. The story comes just the year after his Winesburg, Ohio cycle of stories, where Anderson's unique sense of American pathos snapped into focus. My sense is that he was such a purely intuitive writer he barely knew what he was doing. There's a great sense of searching in "The Egg," searching for the way to express something burning inside him and all of us—a conflagration that goes out of control for the narrator's father in this strange, wonderful story.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Egg and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Sherwood Anderson is a singular writer whose most famous and characteristic work is this collection (or cycle) of short stories. There's nothing else quite like it, though the list of those influenced by him is long and illustrious: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, etc.—I would push it even further into the future and include Raymond Carver too. But though you can feel the echoes in these and other writers, no one I know wrote stories like these. The closest analogue in American literature might be the Spoon River Anthology collection of poems by Edgar Lee Masters. Anderson's stories have an air of discovery, even naivete, that is so unself-conscious that reading them almost feels like prying sometimes. The stories are connected by place—see title, noting that the real-life Clyde, Ohio, and not Winesburg, is the setting. They are also connected by a peripheral character who haunts the edges of most of them, a young man named George Willard. They aren't really stories at all, except in the sense of those told by firelight. They are more like meditations on and riffing off of the lives of a parade of isolated individuals who inhabit the town. "What about that Wing Biddlebaum?" someone might say in the darkness across the fire. "What about that Louise Trunnion, Seth Richmond, Wash Williams?" And Sherwood Anderson nods his head and thinks a minute and then starts to talk about each one. But it gets even more intimate than campfire stories, as Anderson probes deep for details almost not assembled, coming back to him in a jumble. Most of the stories are fragments of such recollections, sometimes amounting to nothing, sometimes amounting to a great deal. It's probably the elder George Willard who is telling these stories. It's autobiographical enough that way. But it's only incidentally about George—he's mostly just gossamer that somehow binds. The characters are stunted but that also includes George, the youth and the elder, hence it also includes Anderson himself, whether or not he understood that, which I think it's plain he didn't, even if the point of view bears some whiff of confession, judgment, and/or withering pity. The author is not exempt, whether it is George or Sherwood. Nor is the reader, of course, who may be forgiven some impatience with the simple dolts and fools who populate these stories. We are all citizens of Winesburg, Ohio, and have been from the minute we read a single one of these amazing stories.

In case it's not at the library.