Such was the physical side of Sherwood Anderson’s literary calling. The son of an artisan, brought up among craftsmen, a craftsman himself, he went in for writing as others do for book-binding, engraving, or gilding, out of sheer love for the beautiful materials to be handled and whose lure he could not resist. He confesses to being unable to remember a period in his life when he did not have a hankering for scrawling something in black and white. When he was in business, buying and selling did not interest him as such. He spent his days in writing “ads” which were profitable to his patrons. But as soon as he was at home, the magic spell of the white sheets returned and he could not resist any longer.[41] Fiction seems to be nearer to fact in the United States than anywhere else in the world. America is the land of possibilities. The life of Sherwood Anderson, self-made man, laborer, tramp, novelist and poet, reads like a true novel. It recalls to our mind Jack London’s “Martin Eden.” Like Eden, Anderson attained literary fame by the sweat of his brow and not without an athletic display of muscles. America has never spoiled her writers. Murger’s “Vie de Bohême” tells of no hardships comparable to those which a Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson (not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman) had to go through before they rose to fame. Thanks to this harsh apprenticeship, Anderson himself has learned to be indifferent to comfort. He can write, he tells us, anywhere, and at any time, in a factory room, on a tree stump on the highway, in a railroad station, in the lobby of a hotel and be perfectly unconscious of what is going on around him. He composed parts of “Poor White” in a dingy saloon in Mobile, while next to him three drunken sailors were discussing the divinity of Christ. He wrote the story of Elsie Leander (included in “The Triumph of the Egg”) in the station at Detroit. And that day, he tells us that of course he missed the train. His inborn absent-mindedness could not make him a very prosperous business man, and yet he stuck to manufacturing paint for more than ten years. The way in which he quit his job is characteristic of the man. One day, he tells us, he was in his office dictating letters. Suddenly, and quite unconsciously, instead of proceeding with his dictation, he happened to utter automatically the following words: “And then, he went into the river bed ..., and then he went into the river bed, and then ...” Thereupon Anderson got up. His stenographer thought him insane. He went out never to return, except on one occasion, when he wanted to ascertain what had become of his factory. Even that night he had no luck, for the night watchman mistook him for a burglar and came very near shooting him.