A Death in the Woods-Complete Summary, & Analysis
By Raja Sharma M.Sc., M.Tech., M.A.
Copyright2011@Raja Sharma
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1: To Students
This book, A Death in the Woods-Complete Summary & Critical Analysis, has been written with a view to help those students and teachers who are not so efficient as to get to the bottom of the literary perspectives of the story and text. Summary is helpful to understand the original text better, however, it is always advisable that they should read the original text when they find it appropriate. For the preparation of exams the summary and analysis book is always helpful but the original writing of the writer ought to be the aim of readers. They should always keep in mind that without reading the original works of the writers, study of literature is never complete. It is possible to pass the exams with the help of guide books and study aids materials but the main objective is often missed.
I would like you to read the original text line by line to acquaint yourselves with the subtleties of this beautiful language.
Rajasir
Students’ Academy
Chapter 2: About the Author
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio; Anderson was the third of seven children of Erwin M. and Emma S. Anderson. The failure in business compelled Mr. Erwin to keep on moving frequently. It was only in the year 1884 when they finally settled down at Clyde, Ohio.
Owing to these very misfortunes and rapidly changing locations, young Sherwood was compelled to find various odd jobs to help his family, which earned him the nickname "Jobby." He left school at age 14.
When Anderson moved to Chicago near his brother Karl's home, he started working as a manual laborer until near the turn of the century. Finally, Anderson enlisted in the United States Army. He was called up but did not see action in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war, in 1900, he enrolled at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a job as a copywriter in Chicago and became more successful.
Anderson married Cornelia Lane in 1904; Comelia was the daughter of a wealthy Ohio family. He fathered three children while living in Cleveland, Ohio, and later Elyria, Ohio, where he managed a mail-order business and paint manufacturing firms.
His physical condition brought sudden changes in his behaviour and in the year 1912, in the month of November, he suffered a mental breakdown and disappeared for four days. No one knew where he was but finally he was found wandering around in nearby cornfields. Soon after, he left his position as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and three small children to pursue the writer's life of creativity. Anderson described the entire episode as "escaping from his materialistic existence," which garnered praise from many young writers, who used his courage as an example.
Having come back to Chicago again, Anderson started working again for a publishing and advertising company. In 1916, he divorced Lane and married Tennessee Mitchell.
The first novel “Windy McPherson’s Son” by Anderson was published in the year 1916. Three years after the publication of his first novel, his second major work, Marching Men, was published. However, he is most famous for his collection of interrelated short stories, which he began writing in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. He claimed that Hands, the opening story, was the first "real" story he ever wrote. His themes are comparable to those of T. S. Eliot and other modernist writers
Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt the need to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White, a rather successful novel. He wrote various novels before divorcing Mitchell in 1922 and marrying Elizabeth Prall, two years later.
In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, the themes of which he would carry over into much of his later writing. The novel had its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, considered Many Marriages and Circle Of Death to be Anderson's finest novels.
Beginning in 1924, Anderson lived in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B St. Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in New Orleans. There, he and his wife entertained William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson and other literary luminaries. Of Faulkner, in fact, he wrote his ambiguous and moving short story "A Meeting South," and, in 1925, wrote Dark Laughter, a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience. Although the book is now out of print (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring), it was Anderson's only best-seller.
Anderson's third marriage also failed, and he married Eleanor Copenhaver in the late 1920s. They traveled and often studied together. In the 1930s, Anderson published Death in the Woods, Puzzled America (a book of essays), and Kit Brandon, which was published in 1936.
Anderson dedicated his 1932 novel, Beyond Desire, to Copenhaver. Although he was much less influential in this final writing period, many of his more significant lines of prose were present in these works, which were generally considered sub-par compared to his other works.
"Beyond Desire", set during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, NC, resulted in yet another satirical mention by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway included a minor character in his 1937 novel To Have and Have Not who is an author. This character is working on a novel of Gastonia.
Anderson died in Panama at the age of 64 while on a cruise to South America. An autopsy revealed that he had accidentally swallowed a toothpick (presumably in a martini olive), which had perforated his colon and caused a fatal case of peritonitis. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure."
Anderson's final home, known as Ripshin, still stands in Troutdale, Virginia, and may be toured by appointment.
Chapter 3: Introduction to A Death in the Woods
“A Death in the Woods” is widely accepted and evaluated as Anderson’s finest and most characteristic short story. The narrator in the story is anonymous; he is haunted by a memory from his childhood. In an attempt to understand the enigmatic incident, he returns to the story again and again, seeming to circle closer to the truth with each telling. In composing “A Death in the Woods,” Anderson went through a similar process. Although the story was published in 1933, Anderson had begun working on it at least seventeen years earlier. A ten-page, typewritten fragment—on the reverse side of which Anderson had drafted a portion of Winesburg, Ohio—sketches out several key elements of “A Death in the Woods,” including a narrator who witnesses an eerie scene one snowy, moonlit night involving a pack of dogs who circle around the corpse of a dead woman bearing a pack of food. He completed various other sketches and drafts in the years between the first fragment and final publication.
In his story "Death in the Woods," Sherwood Anderson observes one woman's life and thereby gains a greater appreciation for his own. After reading this story, the theme appears to be that life is a precious gift, which we are given, but too often take for granted. We are put on this earth for a reason, to make a difference in the world and to leave an everlasting impression of the fact that we were here on a mission. We grow from infancy, learning and nurturing, developing into adulthood and making choices. Then just when we think we've discovered the mysteries of life, death ends the cycle. In a cycle of being nurtured and nurturing others, we lose sight of the fact that our life depends on how we live it.
Chapter 4: Original Story
Text
She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I lived. All country and small-town people have seen such old women, but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot carrying a basket. She may own a few hens and have eggs to sell. She brings them in a basket and takes them to a grocer. There she trades them in. She gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she gets a pound or two of sugar and some flour.
Afterwards she goes to the butcher's and asks for some dog-meat. She may spend ten or fifteen cents, but when she does she asks for something. Formerly the butchers gave liver to any one who wanted to carry it away. In our family we were always having it. Once one of my brothers got a whole cow's liver at the slaughter-house near the fairgrounds in our town. We had it until we were sick of it. It never cost a cent. I have hated the thought of it ever since.
The old farm woman got some liver and a soup-bone. She never visited with any one, and as soon as she got what she wanted she lit out for home. It made quite a load for such an old body. No one gave her a lift. People drive right down a road and never notice an old woman like that.
There was such an old woman who used to come into town past our house one Summer and Fall when I was a young boy and was sick with what was called inflammatory rheumatism. She went home later carrying a heavy pack on her back. Two or three large gaunt-looking dogs followed at her heels.
The old woman was nothing special. She was one of the nameless ones that hardly any one knows, but she got into my thoughts. I have just suddenly now, after all these years, remembered her and what happened. It is a story. Her name was Grimes, and she lived with her husband and son in a small unpainted house on the bank of a small creek four miles from town.
The husband and son were a tough lot. Although the son was but twenty-one, he had already served a term in jail. It was whispered about that the woman's husband stole horses and ran them off to some other county. Now and then, when a horse turned up missing, the man had also disappeared. No one ever caught him. Once, when I was loafing at Tom Whitehead's livery-barn, the man came there and sat on the bench in front. Two or three other men were there, but no one spoke to him. He sat for a few minutes and then got up and went away. When he was leaving he turned around and stared at the men. There was a look of defiance in his eyes. "Well, I have tried to be friendly. You don't want to talk to me. It has been so wherever I have gone in this town. If, some day, one of your fine horses turns up missing, well, then what?" He did not say anything actually. "I'd like to bust one of you on the jaw," was about what his eyes said. I remember how the look in his eyes made me shiver.
The old man belonged to a family that had had money once. His name was Jake Grimes. It all comes back clearly now. His father, John Grimes, had owned a sawmill when the country was new, and had made money. Then he got to drinking and running after women. When he died there wasn't much left.
Jake blew in the rest. Pretty soon there wasn't any more lumber to cut and his land was nearly all gone.