ABSTRACT
At the time of Sherwood Ander-IV son's first furtive and uncertain efforts to become a writer, the most important American novelist was Theodore Dreiser, and it was Dreiser's example that showed Anderson the possibility of a true and honest fictional representation of ordinary American life. But to Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser's kind of realism was fundamentally uncongenial and probably impossible. Although Anderson wrote several novels about the effort to succeed the motive to him was always misguided, even base and disgusting. The connection between Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway is usually judged to be stylistic and formal. In Hemingway the discomfort with talk and the sense of its futility, impossibility, and meaninglessness is almost as pervasive as it is in Anderson, but there is much less agony and isolated desperation. Hemingway's prose style and extreme discretion in reporting events reflect his characters' sense of experience and reveal the author's respect for it.
