Story of the Week: Death in the Woods

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)
From Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

Interesting Links

Audio discussion: “The Lonely Voice: ‘Death in the Woods’ by Sherwood Anderson” (Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner, Texas Public Radio)

“Finding Home in the Mountains”: about Sherwood Anderson’s last home (Joan Vannorsdall, Blue Ridge Country)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Egg,” Sherwood Anderson
• “A Wagner Matinée,” Willa Cather
• “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” Edith Wharton

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Road by the Mill, 1892, oil on canvas by American artist Theodore Robinson (1852–1896). Cincinnati Art Museum.

“There is a world into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take you there,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in his early impressionistic memoir A Story Teller’s Story (1924). “There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell you.” Among them is “the old woman accompanied by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day.”

Anderson’s imagination had been agonizing over this raw vision, in various forms, for nearly a decade, and it is fascinating to examine how scraps and fragments came together to form a tale that many critics and readers still considered one of his best. “I have found that an impression got for a story must stay in me for years,” Anderson wrote in his final autobiography. “Perhaps I try to write it but it is not there. . . . I think for example of a story called ‘Death in the Woods.’ It is a story I must have tried to write at least a dozen times over as many years.”

The initial germ of the tale can be found in his archival notes from around the year 1916. While working on the pieces that would become Winesburg, Ohio, he wrote a fragment in which a reporter stumbles upon a macabre scene in a forest: a pack of dogs dragging a bag of meat from the body of a dead woman. The woman’s face shone in the moonlight as if it were saying to the man, “I have fed the animal hungers of man and beast always, since I was a child. My life has been spent doing that and now that life is gone and I still feed animal hungers.”

Returning from a trip to Paris in 1921, the outline of the story began to take shape when he added a passage in his notebook describing the woman, now named Ma Winters. She “had got suddenly old. She did not understand how it happened and perhaps did not try. She was only 36 but how long her life had been.” Pa Winters had met his wife through “a German family named Swartz where she was employed.” At the Swartz’s farm, she spent her days feeding the animals: “the pigs, the colts, the sheep. . . . The cows also loved her.” Yet now she lived with a husband “filled with wrath that was bottled up inside him.” Her dreams were filled with restless, squealing farm animals; from outside the farmhouse “shouts arose from a thousand throats.”

Finally, in 1926, Anderson published the story in two versions. The first appeared as a chapter in Tar: A Midwest Childhood, a fictionalized account of his own youth; the woman’s death is told in the third person as an incident from Tar’s youth. Then, after he sent off the book manuscript to his publisher, he rewrote the chapter. His cover letter to Otto Liveright, his agent, asserted that he had “merely thrown” the chapter into the form of a short story, but the truth is Anderson had done so much more. Removing Tar from the story, he shifted the focus of the story to the woman (now named Mrs. Grimes), rewrote the last section, and—most important of all—changed the story’s perspective to a first-person narrator. The unnamed storyteller blends the facts of the case—what he and others had witnessed—with his experiences since boyhood and brings to readers something more than a biographical report, explaining how and why he had reassembled this “simple” story. “The scene in the forest became for me,” writes the narrator, “the foundation for the real story I am trying to tell.”

Liveright responded to Anderson by reducing expectations. “‘Death in the Woods’ is a fine story but one which I think all the better-paying magazines will reject because they will consider some of the relationships you mention as being illicit and therefore not pure as ivory soap for their readers.” Harper’s Magazine immediately turned it down, but H. L. Mencken at The American Mercury, with about 75,000 subscribers, accepted the story, and it appeared in the September issue—almost three months before Tar was published. The following February “Death in the Woods” received second place ($250) from the annual O. Henry Awards. With minimal (mostly stylistic) alterations, the story became the title selection of Anderson’s last collection of short fiction in 1933.

Four years later, Norman Holmes Pearson and William Rose Benét, who were assembling the first edition of their two-volume Oxford Anthology of American Literature, informed Anderson that “Death in the Woods” would be included and asked him if he would write a brief explanation about his writing of it. The note that appears in the edition reads, in part:

It seems to me that the theme of this story is the persistent animal hunger of man. There are these women who spend their whole lives, rather dumbly feeding this hunger. For years I have wanted to write this story.

As for the technique, it was quite definitely thought out. Over the period of several years I have made several attempts that had to be thrown aside. For example I thought it necessary to definitely lift the animal hunger, I wanted to get at, out of the realm of sex. . . . And there is always the desire to get your story imbedded in the whole life of a community.

The story has its particular form, attempts at flashes out of a community life, . . . all of this to get a certain effect. It is a little hard to define. What is wanted is something beyond the horizon, to retain the sense of mystery in life while showing, at the same time, at what cost our ordinary animal hungers are sometimes fed.

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She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I lived. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Monday, September 7, 2026

Death in the Woods