Death in the Woods and Other Stories

Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933) by Sherwood Anderson is a collection of sixteen short stories, many of which had been published before in various magazines. The collection features a wide range of characters, themes, and storylines: the jealous middle-aged cousins who get into a ridiculous fistfight on the beach, a writer who lost his family and inspiration, a man who returns to his hometown after eighteen years and feels out of place, and more.

The title story, “Death in the Woods,” is the narrator’s recollection of a mysterious old woman and her death in the middle of the snowy woods. Mrs. Grimes lives outside of town with her horse-thief husband and her grown son. She goes to town for meat and tries to make it back to her house before dark, because she has livestock to feed. She steps off the road to take a shortcut, and along the way, she sits down underneath a tree to rest. She dies there, in the cold, and her dogs eat the meat out of her pack before her body is discovered and reported to the local sheriff by a rabbit hunter a couple of days later. As the story goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that he is an unreliable narrator and what he says cannot be taken at face value. Although he tells the story of her life, it is possible that none of it is true—he was young when this happened, and he might be misremembering, or even filling in details where he originally knew none. His details are inconsistent: for example, when the body was found, no one could immediately identify it, although she was known in town. She also appeared young, not old. The narrator says, “The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.” What that real story is, the narrator never actually says.

In “There She Is—She Is Taking Her Bath,” a husband is paranoid that his young wife is having an affair. He wonders if attractive young men are trying to seduce her when he is away at work; the very idea drives him to distraction. He considers his wife like a child: easily flattered, led astray, unwise to the wiles of the world. And yet, he reveals that his own incompetence in business caused him to hide some assets by transferring them into her name. Although he ostensibly manages those assets, they are legally hers. She is not content to allow him to do whatever he wishes without her; in fact, she might decide to do things with those assets without him. The money gives her leverage and a certain amount of independence, and this makes him uncomfortable. He hires detectives to follow her and gets a clean report, but he still suspects. The end of the story echoes the beginning, with him coming home and her in the bath. It is unclear whether any of the events in the story happened, or if he imagined the entire scenario.



In “Like A Queen,” the narrator describes moments where men see a woman whom they think is the most beautiful in the world and they remember that image for years. Then he describes his own, a woman named Alice, who came down from the mountains of Tennessee to become a singer. She is not traditionally pretty, but the adventurous and generous way she lives attracts the narrator. She becomes beautiful to him when he sees her hiking through the Adirondacks, striding like a queen down a moonlit road, and the mountain girl she was collides with the woman she is now.

The mountains and mountain people reappear in a few stories. “These Mountaineers” tells the story of a backwoods hollow the narrator lives in for a while. He meets an orphan girl of twelve or thirteen who survives by attaching herself to a young man; there is a strong implication that she is already pregnant. “A Sentimental Journey” is a second-hand tale about a mountain man named Joe who is curious about the world beyond the mountains and hills, but who cannot quite escape them. “A Jury Case” is about moonshine and the three rough men who make it in a hidden still up in the mountains. One of them steals the still, and the perpetrator is murdered by one of the other men, who is now in jail awaiting trial and probably execution.

Anderson also writes about writers and the struggle of the writing process. “The Flood” features a college professor attempting to write a book about values. He takes a sabbatical, does his research, but struggles with writing. His wife had died, and he was lonely, but the summer of his sabbatical year, his house becomes a haven for relatives and friends. He eventually gives up writing and joins the merriment and life again. He does not appear to write his book. In “The Lost Novel,” a man writes one popular novel. In the process, he alienates and abandons his family, once striking his wife. When she leaves him and takes the children, he also loses his writing ability. One day, he writes a whole novel in a single go and then takes himself out to celebrate. However, when he looks at the stack of papers on his desk, every single page is blank. These stories reveal a belief in the importance of family to writers, implying that isolation from love and life leads to an inability to create.



Unreliable narrators are featured throughout the collection. Many of the narrators freely admit that they are untrustworthy—that they are trying to tell a story or remember events, are daydreaming about things they could say or do, or they admit outright that they are neglecting to say things, with vague promises that they will get around to it eventually. They never really do. Another prevalent theme is lost love or relationships. Occasionally, one has the sense that a single narrator is telling several of the stories because he uses the first-person point of view and mentions at various points that he is a writer.