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Ray Lewis White tells us in the preface to his Ohio University Press edition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio that when he was a graduate student he was determined to publish books on Anderson and that he had "called into dreaming existence" the goal of one day producing his own edition of Winesburg, Ohio (xi). Over 35 years later, having secured his reputation as one of the preeminent Anderson scholars with numerous books on Anderson's life and writings and several editions of his other works, White's goal has been achieved in this edition, which White calls an "expert text" (lviii). It is with some trepidation, however, that I must report that it is neither an "expert text" nor a successful scholarly edition.
My attention is directed not to Anderson's work but to White's editorial principles and their execution in this edition. White has spent much of his career foraging through "Anderson Country" and as a result has edited some praiseworthy collections of Anderson's writings, such as Return to Winesburg (1967), Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays (1972), Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings (1989), and Sherwood Anderson's Secret Love Letters: For Eleanor, a Letter a Day (1991), as well as a critical edition of Anderson's Memoirs (1969). His frequent contributions to The Winesburg Eagle (now The Sherwood Anderson Review), among other journals, amply demonstrate his close familiarity with Anderson's life and career. Clearly, White has strong credentials to assume the mantle of an "expert" scholar of Anderson's works. But in editing other, previously published books by Anderson, he has demonstrated eccentric and rather questionable editing practices, some of which have been carried over to this edition.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, White was general editor of the shortlived Press of Case Western Reserve University edition of "The Major Fiction of Sherwood Anderson" and published "critical texts" of A Story-Teller's Story (1968), Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1969) and Marching Men (1972). Reviewers dismissed these editions, in large part because of White's editing practices.1 In these editions, White presented something akin to "genetic" texts, which documented Anderson's development of a given work within the critical text by a confusing series of brackets and asterisks. As he tells us in the preface to Winesburg, in the 1970s...