Tar

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Sherwood Anderson's autobiographical novel begins with a sly confession: the truth of memory is never simple, and every storyteller invents as much as he recalls. From that starting point, the book follows Tar Moorehead, a fictional alter ego who carries the burden of Anderson's past and lets him explore childhood, imagination, and the uneasy border between fact and fancy. Tar is born into poverty in small-town Ohio, where children are another necessity and Camden becomes, in memory, a place of rustic innocence, hardship, and emotional truth. Yet the novel keeps returning to the pain of seeing the past clearly: people change, places decay, and childhood illusions cannot survive contact with adult life. Against this backdrop, Tar's father, Dick Moorehead, emerges as a restless, charismatic drifter who thrives in a frontier town shaped by railroads, newspapers, trade, and the crisis over slavery and war. The story moves through family tensions, the unsettling presence of formerly enslaved people in the household, and Tar's own impulsive, fear-driven adventures. At school, in Sunday School, and on the town's edges, he learns how stories can turn panic into pride, while the family itself is quietly altered by love, restraint, and the arrival of Doctor Reefy.