_A Story Teller’s Story_ _OTHER BOOKS BY_ SHERWOOD ANDERSON WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON, _A novel_ MARCHING MEN, _A novel_ MID-AMERICAN CHANTS, _Chants_ WINESBURG, OHIO, _A book of tales_ POOR WHITE, _A novel_ THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG, _A book of tales_ MANY MARRIAGES, _A novel_ HORSES AND MEN, _A book of tales_ _A Story Teller’s Story_ The tale of an American writer’s journey through his own imaginative world and through the world of facts, with many of his experiences and impressions among other writers--told in many notes--in four books--and an Epilogue. _Sherwood Anderson_ _New York_ _B. W. Huebsch, Inc._ _Mcmxxiv_ COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. PRINTED IN U. S. A. TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ, who has been more than father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this big, noisy, growing and groping America, this book is gratefully dedicated. Portions of this book have been published in the _American Mercury_, _Century_ and _Phantasmus_ and to these magazines the author makes due acknowledgment. CONTENTS. BOOK ONE 3 BOOK TWO 131 BOOK THREE 287 BOOK FOUR 345 EPILOGUE 411 _A Story Teller’s Story_ A STORY-TELLER’S STORY IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities. My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker.