Many Marriages

Many Marriages (1923) is a novel by Sherwood Anderson. Inspired by his own decision to abandon his family and career in order to establish himself as a professional writer, Anderson explores the guilts, routines, desires, and disappointments driving the lives of many Americans in the early-twentieth century. Although he is known today for his story collection Winesburg, Ohio, a pioneering work of Modernist fiction admired for its plainspoken language and psychological detail, Anderson’s Many Marriages is a masterpiece in its own right. “There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer of washing machines. […] [A]t odd moments, when he was on a train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track, he gave way to dreams.” On an otherwise average day in his office at an Ohio washing machine factory, John Webster finds himself dreaming. He contemplates an affair with his young secretary, hears a number of voices in his head, and watches an angelic woman drift down the river on a raft beneath the afternoon sun. When he returns home after work, he struggles to look his wife and daughter in the face, feeling deep in his heart he will have to leave them soon. Despite spending his whole life in service of the mundane—building his business, supporting his family, securing his finances—Webster knows he can no longer live an impassionate life. He knows he must reinvent himself from scratch. This edition of Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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