3

Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Chicago

An unknown person cut out a poem from the newspaper and pasted it into what appears to be the inside of the front cover of an old journal. The journal itself is gone and only the cover is left with the yellowed newspaper clipping inside. The poem is titled “The Little Room” and is signed “M. Stranger,” which is most likely a pseudonym. The poem begins with the instruction that it is a song to be sung to, “I Want to Be an Angel.” The poem relates the hopes and wishes of the writer who dreams of being a writer who can join the Little Room. The members are very clannish, she says, and the writer hopes to be asked to join if she can keep up the pretense of indifference and not look too eager. The writer calls the members the “Hoi Polloi” and says she will soon be “Too Aged” to join the Little Room. She ends by asking and wants to know “What can I do that’s worthy/The Goal—‘The Little Room.’”¹

The poem is undated and was kept as part of the Little Room’s papers. It’s tempting to ascribe the poem to Harriet Monroe after she fell away from the group, upset that they seemed to have closed their doors to young writers, one of which she had nominated and had been rejected.² There’s no evidence that she wrote the poem, but her difficulties with the group had just started and the poem most likely dates sometime after 1910. The poem calls out the club for being clannish and snobbish, which Monroe had difficulties with too. The “angels” of the “Little Room” meet in the best rooms on the top floor of the Fine Arts Building and so the poem suggests that they think of themselves as rather close to God at the top of the artistic hierarchy of Chicago and almost religious in their adherence to a certain kind of aesthetics. The darkest moment happens in the last lines, when the writer expresses that they are aging and would do anything to become a permanent angel in the club: immortal, stagnant, and dead.

When Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson each arrived in Chicago, neither had the money nor the prestige to join the few groups that took literature and arts seriously. Masters and Anderson, along with Floyd Dell and Carl Sandburg, formed the core of what would be considered the new school of Chicago writing. The new generation of writers formed a new, modern, and collective response to the older regionalism and realism, so championed by Howells and published by the established magazines. The new Chicago writers and artists would be published by the new and modern little magazines, including Monroe’s Poetry and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s The Little Review, and reviewed by the Chicago papers which would boost anything that could raise Chicago’s position in the artistic and literary markets. Anderson and Masters became literary celebrities and had to sell the idea of the new Chicago Renaissance along with their books.

This chapter draws from Edgar Lee Masters’s and Sherwood Anderson’s collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. The chapter’s first section shows how Edgar Lee Masters, after leaving Chicago, named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. The second section argues that Sherwood Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. The chapter then reveals that although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise.

Edgar Lee Masters’s critique of Chicago

Masters moved to Chicago in 1892 during the Columbian Exhibition and found a job collecting bills for the Edison Company. He was trained by his father as an attorney and eventually built a successful law practice in Chicago. He became partners with labor attorney Clarence Darrow for eight years, who had become well-known for defending the Haymarket Anarchists. Darrow was responsible for petitioning the governor to grant clemency for the three imprisoned labor leaders and his appeal worked. Newly elected Governor Altgeld granted the clemency, stating that their trial had been unfair and was a miscarriage of justice. Darrow and Masters had similar dramatic and bombastic styles in the courtroom stemming from their love of the arts, literature, and theater. They each wrote books and poetry when they had time and enjoyed the company of the fellow attorney and lover of the arts Henry S. Monroe, Harriet’s father. The partnership ended when Darrow left to defend John and James McNamara in California in mid-1911. The relationship had been a contentious one, with each accusing the other at the end of various acts of impropriety. The relationship became so bitter that Darrow became Masters’s wife’s attorney during their divorce.3 Masters’s work as an attorney took up so much time, he lamented that he didn’t have more time for artistic pursuits. By the time he received some attention for his poetry, the old art scene that formed around the World’s Fair had closed itself off from new members and many of the younger members were looking to leave to greener pastures in New York and Europe.

On November 22, 1914, the Chicago Tribune ran a small column announcing “Edgar Lee Masters, who has practiced law in Chicago for more than twenty years, is the author of the Spoon River Anthology, a group of poems in free verse which has been printed serially in ‘Reedy’s Mirror’ under the pseudonym of Webster Ford.” Masters had been concerned that his poetry, if well-known, could hurt his law practice because of its tone and new way of presenting the small town. The paper then announced: “Macmillan will publish the anthology when it has been completed.”⁴ On May 15, 1915, the Chicago Tribune announced its review of Spoon River Anthology with a drawn head shot of Masters and the gushing text: “Chicago has unawares been harboring a poet of unusual merit in the person of Edgar Lee Masters, an attorney of this city, whose book, Spoon River Anthology has challenged the acrious consideration of the literary world. In form and content there has been nothing like this published before.”⁵ Elia W. Peattie’s glowing review of the “odd, new” poet ends with the simple declaration, “Once possessing the book, one is unwilling to part with it. It is too notable a piece of literature to omit from one’s library.”⁶ Robert B. Peattie in the July 11, 1915, Tribune placed Spoon River Anthology next to Vachel Lindsay’s Congo and Other Poems and asked “Is This the Beginning of an Illinois School of Poetry?” He argues that both books of poetry “have made a new departure in verse and created a definite style and technic which may be the nucleus of a new school of poetry in Illinois destined to have an important bearing upon the development of English poetry.”7

Journalists and writers in Chicago considered Masters’s book of poetry a remarkable achievement and one that brought attention to a new kind of poetry and writing that had sprung up in the city. Masters’s work separated itself aesthetically and through its narrative from the work of Chicago writers Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who had published popular and well-reviewed novels just the decade before. Both Dreiser and Sinclair wrote “critical realism,” a “type of fiction which reports truthfully warped social relationships so men may study and improve them.”⁸ Vernon Louis Parrington named William Dean Howells the “prophet” of realism in 1930 for his championing of art that tells the truth about the new modern and industrial urban spaces of America.⁹ Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), do just that. The plots of the novels are simple, in order to give both writers ample space to catalog, in painstaking detail, the realities of gritty urban life and the unfeeling wealthy who inflict countless daily indignities on the lower classes. Masters’s poetry is light, terse, and in free verse, the exact opposite of the excessive language in the realistic novels. His poetry uncovers the failed promises and scandalous secrets of the small town in America so exalted by Howells and the realistic writers of the previous generation.

Howells’s review of Spoon River Anthology identifies Masters’s work as possibly being like Whitman’s. He declares: “Freak for freak we prefer compressed verse to shredded prose, but because both of these are freak things we will not decide whether Uncle Walt will be more enduring than Mr. Masters.”¹⁰ His use of the word “freak” associates Masters’s work with the numerous negative reviews of the Armory Show the previous year, and the idea of “shredded prose” recalls imagistically the cubism of the exhibit. Howells sees in Masters something new and indisputably modern. Howells praises Masters despite his absolute dislike of his form and the new modernism in general. He allows:

It is when the strong thinking of Mr. Masters makes us forget the formlessness of his shredded prose that we realize the extraordinary worth of his work. It is really something extraordinary, that truth about themselves which his dead folk speak from their village graveyard; for it is the truth about the human nature of us, if not the whole truth about our respective lives.

Howells praises the verity of Masters’s work, which is the highest praise he offers because he believes verity should be central to a work of art. But, then he declares: “It will not last.”11

Despite Howells’s review, Chicago continued to praise the new and exciting poetry collection. By November of 1916, Masters and his entire family had achieved celebrity status in Chicago. The Tribune published a picture of Edgar Lee Masters’s wife and daughters on the society pages, directly beneath a large picture of British royalty at a charity sports event and next to a picture announcing the divorce of an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.¹² That same year, Sherwood Anderson published Windy McPherson’s Son, the story of how Sam McPherson, the son of a drunkard in small town Ohio, moves to Chicago and climbs through the ranks of the business world to become a wealthy success. The more professional success he has, the more his personal life falls apart and the more immoral he becomes. Anderson spent the year writing the short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, and when it finally came out in 1919, the influence Masters had on Anderson was obvious. Burton Roscoe’s June 7, 1919, review of Winesburg, Ohio, begins with the statement that “comparison” with “the Spoon River Anthology is rather inevitable, possibly so inevitable that it may be questioned whether the analogy is totally legitimate.”¹³

David Minter sees this period as an especially fertile time for Chicago artists and writers. He reports Ford Maddox Ford announcing from Paris that the “Midwest was seething with impulse.”¹⁴ He sees all of the young writers as having “wanted to contribute the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ culture.”¹⁵ Masters was one of the poets who, along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg, everyone read, in part, because Monroe published them in Poetry. Walt Whitman, as even Howells noticed, was experiencing a revival and his message of revolution and freedom spoke to the young, radical poets.¹⁶ Everything was up for renovation and doing so followed the charge of the earlier reformers and the Settlement House movement at Hull House. However, Poetry magazine, the Little Room circle, and the young group of Chicago writers did not critique the idea of cultural uplift that was so much a part of the Chicago way of doing the business of art. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has shown that there was only a “rephrasing of it,” and they remained aligned and loyal to the institutions of Chicago.17

Lisa Woolley has noticed that “Spoon River Anthology makes little attempt to represent Midwestern speech,” which distinguishes Masters from the other Chicago Renaissance writers and their regionalist predecessors. She sees the lack of dialect in the collection as stemming from his interest in the idea of “literariness,” and his training as an attorney.¹⁸ The lack of dialect suggests that he understood that if the book contained dialect, it would be quickly declared a Chicago book and perhaps criticized for its lack of uplifting content. The language also indicates that Masters had a vision that was larger than Chicago and wrote for an audience outside the limits of the Tribune. Woolley points out that his “inclusion of representatives from all parts of the social spectrum links Spoon River to other writing from this period.”¹⁹ He was, after all, a defense attorney and his vision for art must be understood, in part, by working with Clarence Darrow whose ideas for social justice served a community larger than Chicago.

Edgar Lee Masters names the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. After leaving Chicago, he wrote a series of letters to Harriet Monroe about his divorce and how badly it was proceeding. He mixes the news about his divorce with an ongoing discussion about Chicago. He complains that Fanny Butcher, the literary critic at the Tribune has misrepresented him. He writes:

I too wish to return to Chicago. In the flush days of my fame I was importuned to come to New York, and offered things to do so. But I refused; and while I am on this subject I want to say to you that those things that Fanny Butcher printed, and that are still printed in the News about my loving New York and disliking Chicago, and that Chicago is not a literary center, are as grossly untrue as they are deeply malicious. I was unwise enough to be interviewed, first by a woman at the New York Tribune who has a grudge against Chicago because of some newspaper experience there, and she asked me for example, if I liked this or the other feature of Chicago. I said I didn’t as to some of things, but I said in all instances that the very things I disliked about Chicago were good for me and stimulated my writing. What she printed was pure perversion, and Fanny Butcher took it up to make enemies for me. This is a nice world. The same thing is true about the literary center matter.²⁰

He is deeply concerned he has been misrepresented in the Chicago press, which paradoxically needed his celebrity to sell itself and Chicago. His concern is that the commercial literature business of Chicago will work against him, even more than it already has.

In a letter to Agnes Lee Freer, dated September 9, 1924, he writes: “Chicago will have a literature in spite of the Tribune and the News but never without their aid. For Chicgoa [sic] is really full of cliques; and it has not risen out of its provincial intimacies and leagues.” He returns to his “theme” as he calls it in a postscript to the same letter, where he identifies the Chicago art world’s cliquishness as emerging out of Chicago boosterism: “So you remember that the boom of Spoon River really carried several books into prominence, even Frost’s? It created the swell upon which several boats came into port, the interst [sic] that projected itself to poetry at large. Since then a lot of local boosters have fancied that the ascension of their favorites could be brought about by my declension, and they have attacked and praised accordingly.”21

He complains in that same letter about how “it’s funny how people who make apolitical faith out of the equal distribution of wealth, are indifferent to the faith after they are filled themselves; and it is this kind of people who are indifferent to the equal distribution of honors all the time.” The cliquishness of Chicago extended beyond that of the clubs, because it became extremely difficult to obtain any awards or acknowledgment by the papers without the right “Bohemian” connections.

His disgust at the critics reveals the business of writing and how the newspapers perpetuate it. On September 9, 1924, he points out that the newspapers don’t even back their critics. He writes:

Do not think that the proprietors of those papers do not stand for their critics. They do, and by that token they stand for against the writers criticized or ignored. You remember when Burton Rascoe was let out of the Tribune for something he said about a Christian Science book. That would not do, you see. It hurt advertising, and when advertising is hurt editors and owners can’t live so high.²²

He’s particularly annoyed with Fanny Butcher’s reviews through the twenties, of himself and others.

By June 28, 1925, Masters decided he’s never returning to Chicago. He writes to Mrs. Freer:

You have asked me more than once if I shall ever return to Chicago, and I wonder if the same question is asked the numberless others who have divorced themselves from the city that Wells described a lapse from civilization. Every writing artist or other artist who has been able to leave Chicago has done so; and the city has failed to recruit itself from the ranks of those who originated near it, and for the matter of proximity might have chosen it as an abiding place.

Masters then lists every writer who had left Chicago, including Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland who “tried his best,” and Carl Sandburg. He points out the list would go on for pages if he named everyone who left to be free and associate among like-minded people. He reiterates that Chicago is a “clique” with a “village mind.” The village has been completely dominated by “influence as corrupt and arrogant as the Pattersons and McCormicks, who are the Hapsburgs of Illinois. It is these selfish and envious spirits that engender the vermin that run the literary pages of the News and the Tribune, and who have lost to Chicago valuable men like Burton Rascoe, Floyd Dell, Lucian Cary, and Francis Hackett, all of whom left the field to be occupied by the parasites of the McCormicks, the Lawsons and the Schaefers.”23

On December 19, 1931, he launches into his final overarching complaint about Illinois and the Midwest in general:

And it had Chicago, a city out of the swamps in 60 years. This is what I mean. Meanwhile in New York and New England if you want to make people vomit just mention Illinois to them. They don’t know its history; they don’t want to know it; what they do know about it fills them with contempt for it, with patronization for it.²⁴

Masters’s letters reveal his scathing public critique of Chicago’s linkage of the art and business worlds through patronage. He had nothing but contempt for the city that had, in his estimation, reduced the American novel to a predictable and profitable formula.

Sherwood Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Craftsman ideal

The Fine Arts Building became an advertisement for Chicago’s art scene in 1911. The Studebaker Corporation produced a thirty-one page pamphlet, written by Elia W. Peattie, that advertised the building as the center of Chicago’s cultural and artistic life. Each page has multiple photographs, showing Lorado Taft’s and Anna Morgan’s studios, Francis Fisher Browne’s bookshop remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright, and countless other delights. Peattie usurps Fuller’s book title, Under the Skylights to uncritically describe the meeting place of the Little Room. She even promises that a lucky tourist might catch a glimpse of “a Bohemian.” The building had become a tourist attraction and its mere presence demonstrated, like the Art Institute and Symphony before it, that Chicago had uplifted itself to as lofty a perch as those other, older cities in New England and Europe. The artists did their part by participating in the commercialization of their studio spaces. The building now appeared as a department store for wealthy buyers of art, where potential clients could move easily from studio to studio.25

When Sherwood Anderson moved to Chicago the second time, in 1912, he avoided the building entirely, and found his way to the 57th Street Artists’ Colony through Floyd Dell whom his brother, Karl Anderson, knew. Dell encouraged him to associate with the colony and soon after, he introduced Margaret Anderson to the colony too. Sherwood Anderson joined the loose group that had set up in old storefronts used for the Columbian Exhibition along 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue. Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg lived there, and all of the other significant artists working in Chicago at the time visited frequently: Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson’s second wife.²⁶ The colony lasted only a brief time and was born out of financial necessity. By that time, the rents were much cheaper on 57th Street than at the Fine Arts Buildings and many young artists, such as Margaret Anderson, could afford to live there. He also attended the Dill Pickle Club, an art gallery, coffee shop, and speakeasy, right off of Bughouse Square in the Gold Coast. Like the 57th Street colony, the Club was merely a place to meet and be entertained, rather than a formal club like that of Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers or the Little Room.²⁷

Anderson had just had a “nervous breakdown,” in Elyria, Ohio, on November 28, 1912. That day, he walked out of his successful Elyria paint business and left his wife Cornelia and children. He would file for divorce from Chicago. The story would become well-known among the Chicago Renaissance writers and artists because it speaks of one artist’s resistance to the shackles of the business world. Anderson left Ohio and went to Chicago after walking out on his wife and business and the story would serve as an excellent metaphorical warning about artists not taking on the shackles of a middle-class existence. He would rewrite the story of his breakdown several times, including in his 1942 memoir, and in doing so shifts the story’s meaning from a warning about what could happen if a young, male writer attempted to have a bourgeois, domestic existence while being a writer to a parable about a writer choosing to walk away from unbearable constraints.

Anderson’s antipathy toward Chicago begins in earnest after doing advertising work for Frank Lloyd Wright. Anderson took a job at the Chicago advertising firm, Taylor-Critchford, and in mid-November of 1916, he found himself assigned to do the copy and campaign for Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Built Homes. Wright had just suffered a series of personal tragedies and was a very changed man from the young architect he used to be before public opinion drove him out of Chicago to Wisconsin. In 1909, Wright and Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of Wright’s clients, met, fell in love, and in 1909 left their families and spouses to meet in Europe. The scandal hit the Chicago Tribune, where the two were tried for their immorality because of their openness and because his wife Catherine refused to divorce. The pair returned and found Chicago extremely hostile. He remodeled his Oak Park studio into a home and rental property for Catherine and the children, and the scandalous couple settled at the newly built Taliesin “love bungalow” in Wisconsin. On August 15, 1914, Wright was back in Chicago attending to an important commission: the construction of Midway Gardens. He received a cryptic wire that said simply: “Taliesin destroyed by fire.” Wright returned home to discover that their servant, Julian Carlton, had attacked Mamah, her children, and several workmen, pouring gasoline under the door and setting the home ablaze. Some of the victims tried to escape by breaking windows and Carlton attacked them from outside with a hatchet. In the end, eight people died—seven victims and the murderer himself. Police never found a motive for the attack.28 Wright, quite understandably, never recovered.

Robert McCarter points out that “Wright’s personal tragedy at Taliesen, occurring almost exactly at the moment the war began, acted to change his world view, marking the beginning of his slow but steady withdrawal from urban society, and his increasingly negative attitudes about the economic forces that controlled and shaped it.”²⁹ Wright’s scandals will haunt Anderson, in part, because he met him right after the murders at Taliesin that permanently changed Wright and because Anderson will identify with the tragedy that Wright suffered as a result of romantic scandal. Anderson will also begin to regard himself a craftsman who fights against middle-class ordinariness.

Anderson designed a six-page folder and promotional letter for Wright’s system-built homes, a community of affordable and yet beautiful housing. The houses would not be precut, ready-made housing, but rather beautifully made homes by a craftsman who planned out every detail.30 They would be affordable because of the absence of ornamentation and beautiful because of the horizontal lines and design Wright had already become well-known for as a member of the American Arts and Crafts Society. Most important, the house would be completely American. The language of the pamphlet repeats much of the language and phrasing from Wright’s earlier lectures and essays: “The Art and Craft of the Machine”³¹ delivered to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House in 1901 and “In the Cause of Architecture,” which was published in the March 1908 Architectural Record.³² Anderson most likely was furnished with the earlier essays and this, in turn, provided him with the opportunity to study Wright’s manifesto of design.

Anderson was in the middle of composing Winesburg, Ohio, when he did the promotional material for Wright and Wright’s ideas about composition, line, and form helped Anderson develop a new American literary modernism. Wright’s Arts and Crafts ideals would also have appealed to Anderson, because he needed a method to fight against the system of linking business with art in Chicago that he so despised. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its dwindling art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage.

In a letter to his friend Marietta D. Finley, dated November 27, 1916, he writes:

Chicago is horrible. The living impulses that drive the men I meet day to day are materialistic. They want to preserve the respectability of their homes and keep alive the institution of prostitution … They are weakly sentimental, occasionally coarse beyond your comprehension and for the most part there is no life in them. At times there comes over me a terrible conviction that I am living in the city of the dead. In the office dead voices discuss dead ideas.

He continues to complain about the things he has to do to make money, including writing “imagist poems for the early Spring market,” because he is “sharp and smart like the Chicago advertising man.” The letter ends with the point that he thinks “we will have an American Art unlike any other art in the world when men, like my friend who makes fences, become artists.” He realizes that “the little professional artist will be quite furious in the face of it.”33 Anderson finds the professional artists who create art just as infuriating as the businessmen and the advertising men who attempt to tie art and business together. He attacks imagism directly and by doing so attacks Poetry magazine, that bastion of professionally sanctioned art by Harriet Monroe. He thinks art should be made by outsiders and he adopts the craftsman language and ethos to describe this antidote to the industrial scene he hates in Chicago.

In a letter to Upton Sinclair on December 12, 1916, he sees “something terrible to me in the thought of the art of writing being bent and twisted to serve the end of propaganda.” He asks Sinclair, “Why should we as writers be primarily socialists or conservationists, or anarchists, or anything else?”³⁴ For the remainder of the letter, Anderson condemns Sinclair’s much-celebrated social realism. He ends by telling him, “I so want to see writers quit this drawing themselves apart, becoming socialists, or conservatives, or whatnot.”³⁵ Anderson’s animosity toward Chicago’s patronage systems, like Fuller’s, emerges from his belief that those who stand at the highest levels in the Chicago art and business scene cannot raise themselves to a higher cultural level because they expect their art to be useful in some way, whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life. However, Anderson’s published works demonstrate that he understood that in order to be published and reviewed well in the Chicago papers, he needed to at least publicly boost the image of the city and contribute to its higher life in some way.

He wrote to Lucille Blum, the wife of the Chicago painter and author Jerome Blum on July 1, 1923, about why he can’t stand Chicago and won’t be moving back or even visiting any time soon. He declares: “I’m pretty much going to stay away from Chicago and New York … the eternal grubbing about the purposes of art, its drift, … gets on my nerves.”³⁶ He never does return for any length of time. In 1925, Anderson vacationed in Virginia and was so taken by the landscape he purchased farm property by the small town of Troutdale in Grayson County.³⁷ He lived in a small cabin on the property while his friend William Spratling from New Orleans built his house. Spratling had been a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, and the two men became friends during Anderson’s visits and stays in that city. Spratling had, in recent years, become an internationally renowned silversmith and jewelry maker, and he organized the Mexican silver workers into craft guilds for power in the market. Anderson hired a craftsman to build his house and he lived permanently after 1927 in the modern log cabin structure he named Ripshin.38 The house shows the influence Frank Lloyd Wright had on Anderson because, while it doesn’t resemble one of Wright’s more radical designs, the floor plan and aesthetics of the house show respect for Wright’s design principles.

Wright was still very much on Anderson’s mind. He mentions Wright in a letter to his friends Ferdinand and Clara Schevill around October 6, 1930. He had just attended an exhibit of Wright’s architectural designs that was held at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 25 to October 12, 1930, and so was thinking deeply about the architect who had so much influence on him while in Chicago.³⁹ He writes: “I have been thinking a good deal about Wright. I’ll write a story about him some day.” He thinks that there “is something pitiful there,” and that contemplating Wright and his life should draw out our sympathies. Anderson believes that Wright, by himself, has “humble, hurt moments” because he understands in those moments that “he has himself killed the chance for a life of beautiful building.” Anderson connects with Wright because he thinks that he’s done similar things and destroyed the better things in himself too.⁴⁰

In 1936, Anderson will decide to write his memoir and he procrastinates on the project until 1939, when he finally decides to really do it. One of the reasons it takes so long to begin is that he wants to do the book in some kind of non-standard way and so he makes a lot of lists of people and ideas. His last list is a list of “suggestions” of people and topics that have been important in his life. Frank Lloyd Wright appears two-thirds of the way down the list, right after “Gertrude Stein, Roger Sergel and Lewis Galantiere.” Reading the list, it’s possible to see his mind working backward in time from Paris to Chicago. Under Wright are the influences from his time in Chicago: “Joyce, Ezra Pound,” “Hemingway,” “Mike Carr and group at 57th street Chicago.”⁴¹ Anderson will continue to identify with Wright as a creator, an artist, and most of all, as a craftsman who has destroyed himself pushing back against provincial and industrial Chicago. The memoir will be his last large project and it’s published posthumously in 1942.