The autobiographical element plays a large rôle in Sherwood Anderson’s books. If there is anybody who seems to have taken upon himself the task to prove and justify the theories of the psychoanalysts, it is certainly he. Day-dreaming, double personality, the comedies which the individual plays to himself,[36] the defense and enrichment of one’s “personality picture,”--all those are the essential themes of his novels. Anderson is the Freudian novelist _par excellence_. Personally, he is an uprooted man with a complex heredity. He betrayed some of it in Windy McPherson, an assumed portrait of his own father (in “Windy McPherson’s Son”). Windy is a Don Quixote with a mania for disguising himself. He cannot write novels but he lives and enacts them. It is difficult to say, in his case, where reality ends and fiction begins. A veteran of the Civil War, Windy McPherson’s imagination has become hypertrophied. He has been shell-shocked and the trauma has left him more than half crazy. Windy is a village Tartarin, a drunkard, a loafer and a megalomaniac. Here is an example of his tragi-comical exploits. One day, his small town has organized a commemorative pageant. A trumpeter is in demand. Windy McPherson does not hesitate to offer himself. For a long time he had been leading fictitious assaults in the imaginative narrations of his prowess. The Bovaryism in his case is in an acute stage. The thought of parading through Main Street astride a fine horse, blowing a bugle before the whole assembly, fills him with pride. Then the great day arrives. A procession is being formed. All are waiting for the signal to start. Windy McPherson is there on his charger as trumpeter. All of a sudden the most lamentable wheeze issues forth from the cavalry trumpet which he wields. How far the ideal from the reality! Windy’s son will never forget the pitiful venture, nor how he blushed before his assembled countrymen. There is but little filial respect left in Anderson’s tales.[37] One of the most tragic episodes in his novels is the one in the same book where Sam’s mother is about to die of ill treatment and misery. Windy has come home drunk, as usual. He is crouching over a table, fussing and mumbling. Suddenly Sam gets up. He marches toward his father, takes him by the collar and throws him out of the room. The scuffle was harsh and the boy rushes out for help, thinking that he may have killed his father. Unfortunately for all concerned, such was not the case. When Sam returns with the neighbors, still trembling lest he may have strangled his father, he finds Windy comfortably settled in a saloon. He could no more die of a blow than of shame, nor could he make a good tragic hero.