"Hands" From Wineburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson-The Classics Circuit

"Hands" from Wineburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (6 pages, 1919)

The Classics Circuit-America's Lost Generation

Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941)

I am happy to be once again participating in The Classics Circuit.  As always, I give my great thanks to Rebecca for this great event and for encouraging the reading of classics.    The topic for March is America's Lost Generation.   The time frame is the post WWI years up until around 1930 or so.   The super star American authors of the period are F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, T.  S. Elliot,  Gertrude Stein,  and John Dos Passos.     In short stories, one of my primary focuses lately,   Sherwood Anderson's  Wineburg,   Ohio was and still is very influential.     The book is a collection of short stories about the ordinary people of an imaginary small town in Ohio.   Frank O'Conner  has said that the short story at its best most often focuses on people at the margins of society, people who do not quite fit in.    This is the exact focus of the wonderful stories in Winesburg, Ohio.   In his magisterial survey  The March of Literature,  Ford Madox Ford lists Wineburg, Ohio as a must read book.  

Anderson felt his best work of all time was his story "Hands", in Wineburg, Ohio.   I read all the stories and I found this the most moving one.

"Hands" is a near shocking story for its subject matter and the depth of psychological penetration.   It is one of the very few works that I am aware of that deal with a male teacher considered to be a molester of the young boys in his class in a sympathetic fashion.     Anderson does a masterful job of letting us see how a man's appearance could lead those around him to come to the conclusion he may well be a child molester (and there is nothing in the story to say the lead character is not in fact one).   It is a perfect account of the effects of profiling in a day when the word "profiling" was not even known.    The plot is simple.   A male teacher likes to show his affection for his male pupils by touching and patting them (on the back as far as we are shown).   The man does not meet the standards for a "manly man" in small town Ohio in 1919 and ends up losing his teaching job and narrowly escapes a lynch mob.    It is what this does to the protagonist that makes this story so interesting.   I do not wish to spoil the story (you can read it in just a few minutes).   The style is simple and straightforward.    This is good old fashioned story telling.    

"Hands" can be read online HERE

I am always looking for ideas for new short stories to read-please leave any suggestions you might have

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