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The Travail of His Soul: Sherwood Anderson and Elyria, Ohio–Part Three of a Series
A solitary figure walks along a railroad in late November of 1912. He is a slim, handsome, dark haired man of thirty-six. His dress shoes are scuffed and muddied; his tie is askew. He walks fixedly ahead, stopping here and there to look around him or up at the sun peeking from the edges of…
Read MoreChristmas, 1921: Eugene Debs Is Released From Prison And Meets President Warren Harding
By December of 1921, Eugene Debs, prominent American labor leader, dedicated activist and five time Socialist candidate for President of the United States, had been imprisoned since April of 1919. Now he was to be released on Christmas Day of 1921, thanks to President Warren Harding of Marion, Ohio. Harding asked Debs to visit the…
Read MoreA Salesman Who Got Control Of A Factory: Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio (Part II of a Series)
I eased my car beneath a railroad overpass, slowed down outside a chain link fence and stopped. A few scattered raindrops fell, and the occasional rubbery grind of the windshield wipers punctuated the engine’s steady purr. Before me loomed the bulk of the BASF chemical factory in Elyria, Ohio. There’s nothing here to indicate this…
Read MoreA Christmas Poem By Carl Sandburg: “Star Silver”
It’s been a long time since I’ve featured a poem here on buckeyemuse.com. I’m working on a series of posts about Sherwood Anderson in Elyria that began a couple of years ago along with some other material, but I’ve been wanting to do some shorter posts. Something I did occasionally in the early days of…
Read MoreThe Books of 1919–And The Life of The Times–In “The Year Our World Began”
1919—just the alliterative sound of it calls to mind the American Century and the birth of the post World War I era. The Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, the Red Scare, race riots and Woodrow Wilson. Dempsey versus Willard, Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox, Walter Hagen and Babe Ruth. Arthur Fields sang “How Ya Gonna…
Read MoreA High School Teaching Plan for “Winesburg, Ohio”
Recently I completed some coursework to renew my license to teach English language arts to grades seven through twelve in the state of Ohio. One of the courses I completed was on teaching American fiction, which involved assignments centered on two books. The books I chose were Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Willa Cather’s My Antonia.…
Read More1918: Some Books From A Century Ago
1918. On November 11 of this year the First World War finally came to an end. Millions had died in the conflict that began in August of 1914, and large sections of France and Belgium were nothing but wasteland after years of battle. But the end of the conflict was welcome news across the globe.…
Read MoreThe Undeveloped Man: Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio–Part One of a Series
Thanksgiving Day—November 28, 1912. In St. Louis, Missouri, Holy Cross and St. Louis University square off on the football field, while elsewhere in the city 4,000 pounds of turkey are provided to the city’s poor. Back east in New York City, Governor John Dix pardons Albert Patrick, one of the two men who in 1900…
Read More“Autumn” from Sherwood Anderson’s “Home Town”
Autumn—the mellow golden time of falling leaves, cider, apples, and pumpkins. The year’s decline and a farewell to summer’s heat and languor. Long hazy days, the time of “mist and mellow fruitfulness.” In the great Midwest the trees are in color and the corn and soy are harvested, leaving bare fields full of stubble to…
Read MoreA Quiet Place of Powerful Tribute: The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana
Dana, Indiana is farm country, the kind of Midwestern land where fields stretch to the horizon, where a state route below the blazing summer sun feels like it’s going to roll forever through endless rows of corn and soy all the way to the Pacific, and when you stop the car and pull over you…
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