Tar: A Midwest Childhood

Sherwood Anderson

Jan 2022 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

This autobiographical novel by the writer of Winesburg, Ohio recounts a young boy’s childhood in the latenineteenth-century rural Midwest.

Sherwood Anderson established his reputation as a great American writer with his sensitive portrayals of Midwestern life at the turn of the twentieth century. First published in 1926, Tar: A Midwest Childhood, is Anderson’s reflection on the Ohio small town of his youth and the experiences that informed and inspired his most beloved works.

In a series of revealing episodes, Anderson describes the developing consciousness of Edgar Moorehead from earliest childhood to adolescence. When his father arrived in Ohio from North Carolina, neighbors derisively called him a Tar-heel. Inheriting this nickname, Tar grows up as one of many children to his stoic, hard-working mother and his gregarious but unreliable father.

About the author

Sherwood Anderson (1876­–1941) worked in advertising and owned a successful paint supply company before he suffered a nervous breakdown and abandoned his business career and his family to devote himself full time to writing. His groundbreaking story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio, is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature. Anderson, according to William Faulkner, “was the father of my generation of American writers.”