Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Death in the Woods, Sherwood Anderson - Ray Lewis White (essay date 1982)

Death in the Woods, Sherwood Anderson - Ray Lewis White (essay date 1982)

Ray Lewis White (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: “‘Death in the Woods’: Anderson's Earliest Version,” in The Winesburg Eagle, Vol. 7, No. 2, April, 1982, pp. 1–3.

[In the following essay, White discusses a 1916 version of “Death in the Woods.”]

The Sherwood Anderson devotee is surely pleased that “Death in the Woods” has achieved status as the author's story outside of the Winesburg cycle most often anthologized and given scholarly attention. Without disparaging “I'm a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “The Egg,” one delights to see “Death in the Woods” become to the public the typical, the standard, the representative single Anderson story; for the texture, the ambiguity, and the complexity of a boy's discovering a woman's dead body in a frozen woodland repays with interest any amount of invested study.

Because Anderson made of “Death in the Woods” a reflection on developing awareness of the...

[The entire page is 1293 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the: