On his mother’s side there is some Latin blood in Sherwood Anderson. He has retained a touching memory of his mother, a native of Italy, dark-complexioned, imaginative, fiery and herself the daughter of a spirited woman. Despite his nostalgia for the Italian Renaissance and his admiration for some of the sixteenth-century supermen, Anderson shows very little Latinity as a thinker and an artist. He is far too nebulous for that and refutes Boileau’s aphorism that what is clearly conceived must needs be clearly expressed. At the age of twelve or thirteen, young Anderson launched himself upon the discovery of the world. For many years he had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow as a mechanic apprentice, a factory hand and stable boy; he tramped among “men and horses” without much discrimination between them. We find him in Chicago, at the age of seventeen, without a cent in his pocket. The great metropolis of the Middle West was to be his headquarters until he reached literary fame. He used it for the background of the stories collected under the title “Winesburg, Ohio.” The modest workman of the Chicago docks and yards had a higher ambition than merely a material livelihood. We recognize him and his dreams in these sons of proletarians who, in his first novels, suddenly rise by the strength of their fists to the highest positions and marry millionaire heiresses, in order to renounce their good fortune suddenly and go in quest of what they call Truth. This is the theme of his first two books, “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Marching Men.” The heroes of these books are young and ambitious, without any faith or any law, but not without any ideals. We see in them Anderson himself, incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, dream from daily existence, and with a pathetic longing toward the Unknown. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the American army mobilized against Spain. He was careful himself to strip this decision of all heroics and to insist upon passing on to posterity for what he precisely was, a well-meaning “chocolate soldier.” Small, stout, near-sighted and still more absent-minded, Sherwood Anderson is modest enough to confess that he never seriously thought of conquering Cuba or enlisting in the Rough Riders. He was satisfied with regaining his health in the open air of the camps and in enjoying the big parade of the marching troops, an enjoyment which he would have shared with Walt Whitman and which has probably inspired in him both the idea and the title of “Marching Men.” * * * * *