Sherwood Anderson wrote the book that taught Hemingway and Faulkner how to write about ordinary Americans. Horses and Men is his wild, tender collection of nine stories about people on the margins of American life - traveling salesmen, small-town drunks, lonely wives, fading performers, men who cannot speak what they feel. The stories range from the brief and devastating to longer, more wandering narratives. What ties them together is his radical empathy - his refusal to look away from the failed, the awkward, the quietly desperate. This is American literature before it learned to be cynical: still capable of seeing dignity in the unnoticed. Dedicated to Theodore Dreiser but addressed to everyone who has ever felt like a ghost in their own life.
