Eleanor and Sherwood in one of their favorite pictures. Although twenty years older than Eleanor, Sherwood found happiness in the last decade of his life with her.*

Writers have their heroes, too. My first literary hero was Sherwood Anderson, from the time I read Winesburg, Ohio (1915), probably the most influential book to appear in American literature after the close of the Nineteenth Century. Anderson was the archetype of the starving artist, in that after he decided to devote himself to literature, he gave up literally everything he had for his craft: family, financial security, public approval. He was finally successful, in his personal life and his finances, but it took him many years and much pain before he was comfortable with himself.

Ol’ Sherwood, as he eventually was referred to, almost universally, was also the most influential writer of the Twentieth Century, but not because of the success of his books. After Winesburg, now considered Sherwood’s greatest book, he had a huge success with Dark Laughter (1925), based on his experiences in New Orleans, where people like William Faulkner came to learn writing under his tutelage. But after that book, his others were less and less successful, and he accepted the role of senior American writer of his generation. He became the mentor to almost all the great writers of America during that time, and saw several of his protégés receive the Nobel Prize, something that he himself knew he would never achieve.
In one of his books, Many Marriages (1923), Sherwood became reflective on his life and a year later published his literary autobiography A Story Teller’s Story. It was almost as if he knew that his productive days were coming to an end, even though Dark Laughter followed a year later to great success. But then the decline set in, as he expected it to. In 1924, he married for the third time, although he continued to support and probably still love his first wife, whom he married in 1904 and who gave him three children. By 1928, he was separated from his third wife.

By this time, Sherwood was living in Marion, Virginia, where he had purchased a farm he named Ripshin, for the creek that meandered past the stone house he would build there, the same house where most of the great American writers of the era would visit. He had also purchased the two Marion newspapers, one Democrat and one Republican, and when he was asked which party he would support, he made it clear that he would continue them just as they were. When he wrote editorials for the Democrat paper, he climbed on his soapbox in faithful support of FDR and the New Deal, but when he wrote for the Republican paper, he thundered just as effectively against it. He even created an iconic Southwest Virginia character, Buck Fever, who “came out of the hills to work for Mr. Anderson,” although he freely admitted he just came down to meet girls. Buck became Sherwood’s alter ego and continued to contribute occasional columns to the papers after Sherwood became bored and turned the operations over to his son.

It was during this permanent sojourn in the mountains that Sherwood began his last novel, Kit Brandon, A Portrait (1936), his depiction of a woman moon-runner, someone who hauled moonshine whiskey out of the hills into the towns that were growing throughout the South, mostly due to the textile industry. Unfortunately, when the galleys for Kit Brandon arrived, Anderson was so put out by writing and writers that he sent them back unproofed and the book was published with many typos. It was the end of his literary career.

Sherwood had enough of the literary life, mostly because one of his star pupils, Ernest Hemingway, turned on him violently, publishing a satirical book based on Dark Laughter, and criticizing Sherwood loudly and publicly. It may have been an early example of the madness that eventually caused Hemingway to blow off his own head in Idaho in 1962, but Anderson never recovered from the attack. In addition, he was crushed that few, if any, of his former protégés rose to his defense. Even though Kit Brandon is now considered one of the first great feminist books of the Twentieth Century, he would not attend a single book signing for it.

But then, Sherwood had other compensations in his life to offset the losses of Kit Brandon. He had met and eventually married Eleanor, the young daughter of Laura Copenhaver, a rich matron of Marion, who had begun her own relief organization to fight the Depression. She collected Southwest Virginia arts and crafts and sold them in her gallery in New York and in the family mansion, Rosemont, in Marion. Until the building was razed for a new fire station, the Copenhaver family continued to operate Rosemont for the benefit of the people of Southwest Virginia.

Eleanor Copenhaver, twenty years younger than Sherwood, was the last great influence on his life. She was a national official with the Young Women’s Christian Association and a social activist. She persuaded him to become involved in the labor movements of the time, and the pair traveled to Harlan County, Kentucky, during the vicious mine wars and he was probably responsible for coining the term “Bloody Harlan.” Until his death in 1941, she was his bedrock and source of the happiness that had eluded him during his literary career. Sherwood had died doing what he had learned to love best: as an unofficial ambassador for America and the essential goodness of the country he had introduced to the modern world. He swallowed a toothpick during a reception for him in Panama during a goodwill trip to South America and died of peritonitis. If it had happened a bit later, the development of penicillin during the Second World War would likely have saved him, but even worse for his legacy, Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the conflict eclipsed any real effort for the American public to appreciate this giant among writers.

I was thinking about Sherwood and Eleanor one late summer day in 1980, when my wife and I were driving back from the beach and I saw the signs for Marion on I-81. I had declared some time before (to great resistance from my advisor) my plan to write my Master’s thesis at Longwood on Kit Brandon. I had read the novel years before, after I found a worn copy in a second-hand bookstore. In spite of the typos, I recognized it for what it was: Sherwood’s attempt to recognize, probably in appreciation of Eleanor, the second-class citizenship still given to women even after they were given the right to vote and the denial of the contributions women had made and could make to the country if they were recognized for their ability. Anderson could have been in the vanguard of what later became the feminist movement, but the attack by Hemingway deeply affected him, and not until the 1960’s did feminist writing come into its own.

We turned off the interstate and went to the chamber of commerce to gather information for the short side trip we were making. It was afternoon of the last day of our vacation and I had to return to work the next day. I thought we would be able to spend a few minutes in Marion before driving on to Kentucky.

I knew Sherwood was buried in Marion and the chamber gave me directions to Round Hill Cemetery, where we eventually found his marker. I asked if there were any descendants of Sherwood still living in Marion, as I planned to write about him some day and I wanted to interview anyone still living who might have spoken with him. I was given directions to Rosemont, and after we left Round Hill, we drove down Main Street and turned up a driveway lined with huge boxwood trees, probably a century old.

We rang the doorbell and a tiny, smiling, elderly lady opened it and welcomed us in. The ground floor of Rosemont was a collection of display rooms, with homemade craft items, made by Southwest Virginia artisans on every available surface. After a few minutes of looking around, I spoke to our guide, saying that everything was lovely, but I had been told that some of Sherwood Anderson’s descendants might be at Rosemont and I wanted to know if I could speak to them. I explained that I had planned to write my thesis on Anderson’s last book and the disappointment he felt with his friends to the attack by Ernest Hemingway. I wanted, if possible, to speak to someone who might know something about that time.

She looked at me and smiled.

“Well, I’m his widow,” she said. “Would I do?”

I was awestruck. During my days in journalism, I have managed to ask questions of three sitting or former Presidents of the United States, several candidates for President, and even managed to film Mother Theresa when she came to open a convent in Jenkins, KY. But nothing amazed me more than to be standing on the creaky wooden floor of an old Southern mansion speaking to the widow of Sherwood Anderson. After my wife managed to push my mouth shut, Eleanor invited us into her dining room for tea. An hour later, one of her assistants asked if she should close up for the day. Eleanor told her to lock the door, but she would be staying late. She had company she wanted to talk to.
 
It was long after dark when we left her. During the time we were there, she spoke freely and confirmed to me the loss Sherwood had felt when Hemingway treated him so savagely. She even invited me to go upstairs to the room where she kept Sherwood’s memorabilia and his ancient typewriter. It was the same one he had used to write his novels and his many letters of introduction for aspiring writers to publishers and great literary personalities like Gertrude Stein. She said I was welcome to type something on it, if I wanted to, and I left with the imprint from the same machine that had opened the world of Paris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and the ungrateful Hemingway. She even invited us back to spend the weekend with her at Ripshin Farm, where Thomas Wolfe had to sleep across the guest bed, since he was too tall to sleep in it properly. She even gave both of us a hug before we left.

Unfortunately, we never made it back and Eleanor passed away five years later, but I went on to write my thesis on Kit Brandon and I used the information Eleanor gave me to complete my work. I occasionally take friends over to Marion to visit the cemetery where Sherwood’s gravestone, a sweeping monolith, towers over their plots. On the stone is the inscription: “Life, not Death, is the Great Adventure.” Behind them is the grave of Cornelia, Sherwood’s first wife, whom he brought to Marion, and who became a close friend to Eleanor.
 
After her death in 1985, a series of love letters Sherwood wrote to Eleanor were published. She had never read them until after his death in 1941, when she found them among his things. He had written one every day from January 1, 1932, until he married her a year later. He and Eleanor had been in love for three years, albeit surreptitiously, as he attempted to shed his third wife and battle the misgivings of her family. He thought that if they never married, she would still have some record of how much he loved her during that painful time. Perhaps he was worried that the affair would end and she would forget him, like his students did, but that did not happen. Forty years after his death, as we sat in her dining room on that late summer night, the love was still there and her eyes lit up every time she mentioned his name. And I still remember the words she said when I met her.
 
“I’m his widow,” she told me. “Would I do?”
 
She certainly did.

*Photos courtesy of the Smyth-Bland Regional Library.