Many Marriages - Sherwood Anderson

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Résumé :
There was a man named Webster who 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. He was a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer. And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year, and his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It was early fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life about as usual and then this thing happened to him. Down within his body something began to affect him like an illness. It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as though something were being born. Had he been a woman he might have suspected he had suddenly become pregnant. ...

Biographie:
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work significantly influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Best known for Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson focused on the inner lives of ordinary Americans, employing spare prose and psychological insight. His fiction often examines isolation, social repression, and the tension between individual desire and communal expectation, making him a central figure in early twentieth-century American literature....

Sommaire:
Many Marriages is Sherwood Anderson's probing novel of middle-class rebellion, spiritual unrest, and the search for authenticity in modern America. Set in a Midwestern town, the novel centers on John Webster, a successful businessman who abruptly begins to question the conventions that have defined his life-marriage, propriety, social expectation, and material success. As Webster attempts to strip away the inherited assumptions of respectability, his crisis unsettles not only his family but the rigid moral structures of his community. More overtly philosophical than Anderson's earlier Winesburg, Ohio, Many Marriages explores themes of sexuality, repression, individual awakening, and the tension between social conformity and personal truth. The novel reflects the ferment of the early 1920s, when traditional institutions were being reexamined in light of war, modern psychology, and shifting cultural norms. Written in Anderson's characteristically plain yet psychologically searching prose, Many Marriages stands as a revealing document of American modernist experimentation and moral inquiry. This Wilder Publications edition presents the complete, unabridged 1923 text....