From now on, the problem of sexual inhibition was going to haunt Sherwood Anderson. He was soon to devote to it a strange and, for the average reader, a most shocking book which we must examine with the same candor which the author has shown in writing it. It is called “Many Marriages.” In order to be entirely just to it, I shall again warn the reader of what I have already suggested. Eroticism and mysticism go hand in hand for Anderson. Having discovered sexual inhibition to be the main cause of social hypocrisy, he preaches the gospel of absolute sexual sincerity as a _sine qua non_ condition of moral progress. To understand the author’s point of view, let us not forget that his stories take place in a Puritan country. Let us remember Theodore Dreiser’s sayings about the primordial importance of the sexual question in a pioneer land where the woman remained, for a long time, as the only luxury allowed to men, and the only object of art offered to their dreams. “Many Marriages” is a confession, a soliloquy, which continues uninterrupted for nearly three hundred pages.[47] The hero is a lunatic, an erotomaniac who parades naked before a Madonna and a crucifix surrounded by burning tapers, in order to better vent his feelings about sex, love and marriage to his daughter. His name is John Webster. He was born in a small Wisconsin town and began as a business man. One day, passing in front of his factory, he heard his workingmen humming a hymn like this: And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave And go home to my father and be saved.