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. With a beautifully designed
cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sherwood
Anderson's Many Marriages is a classic of American literature
reimagined for modern readers.
