Although Sherwood Anderson is not one of the major figures in twentieth-century American literature, he is for several reasons a writer of very considerable significance. At his best in short fiction, this "teller of tales" produced a number of remarkable individual stories--"I Want to Know Why," "The Egg," "I'm a Fool," "The Man Who Became a Woman," "Death in the Woods," and "Brother Death," to take only the most frequently anthologized pieces--as well as the book of related tales, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which is generally considered his masterpiece. His effect on the development of the modern American short story as a genre was of great importance; for he rebelled against what he termed the "poison plot"--that is, fiction written according to standardized formulas, readily marketable but unrealistic as portrayals of actual human beings and human experience--in favor of stories which developed their individual shapes "organically" out of...