Many Marriages
Jun 2026 · Good Press
Ebook
157
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About this ebook
In Many Marriages (1923), Sherwood Anderson turns from the linked short-story form of Winesburg, Ohio to a compact modern novel of marriage, desire, and spiritual unrest in middle-class America. Centering on Webster and Natalie West, the book examines the inadequacy of conventional domestic arrangements and the longing for a more truthful, instinctive mode of life. Anderson's prose is characteristically lyrical, psychologically probing, and deliberately uneven in the modernist manner, privileging mood, confession, and inward crisis over tightly plotted action. In the literary context of the 1920s, the novel belongs to the era's broader revolt against Victorian restraint and its search for new personal and sexual freedoms. Anderson, one of the crucial precursors of American literary modernism, was deeply preoccupied with the damage wrought by industrial society, social conformity, and emotional repression. His own break from business life and his sustained interest in the inner lives of ordinary Americans helped shape this novel's critique of respectable marriage as a form of spiritual enclosure. Many Marriages reflects concerns that recur across his work: loneliness, frustrated intimacy, and the quest for authenticity. This is a rewarding book for readers interested in modernism, the cultural ferment of the Jazz Age, and early twentieth-century explorations of marriage and selfhood. It deserves attention as a bold, unsettling, and intellectually serious meditation on intimacy and freedom.
In Many Marriages (1923), Sherwood Anderson turns from the linked short-story form of Winesburg, Ohio to a compact modern novel of marriage, desire, and spiritual unrest in middle-class America. Centering on Webster and Natalie West, the book examines the inadequacy of conventional domestic arran...
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