From Malcolm Cowley's introduction to the 1960 edition of Winesburg, Ohio (Viking Press), about Sherwood Anderson's personal breakthrough:
Then came another of his incandescent moments, one that he called "the most absorbingly interesting and exciting moment in any writer's life...the moment when he, for the first time, knows that he is a real writer." Twenty years later he described the experience in a letter, probably changing the facts, as he had a weakness for doing, but remembering how he felt:
...I walked along a city street in the snow. I was working at work I hated. Already I had written several long novels. They were not really mine. I was ill, discouraged, broke. I was living in a cheap rooming house...It was very shabby. I had no relatives in the city and few enough friends. I remember how cold the room was. On that afternoon I had heard that I was to lose my job.
...I turned on a light and began to write. I wrote, without looking up--I never changed a word of it afterward--a story called "Hands." It was and is a very beautiful story.**********************
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.
(From "Hands," one of the stories that makes up Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio collection -- click here to buy the $2.50 Dover Thrift Edition.)
