Valentine to Sherwood Anderson
Don't know why the Youtubes sometimes won't post, it's aggravating but here's the link.
Flanagan committed suicide too young for him to have developed into the distinguished composer he would just about certainly have been. Of the Aaron Copland influenced composers, he was one of the best. Especially in the rarely well done field of song writing. I was looking for his setting of James Merrill's Another August and came across this song, performed beautifully by Mary Ann Hart and Dennis Helmrich.
Sherwood Anderson was one of the most important writers for me as a young teenager, the first story, proper, in Winesburg Ohio was probably the first sympathetic treatment of a gay man I ever encountered. I might have been about thirteen - my older sister had the book from a college class. The rest of the stories in the book and, especially the introductory one, Book of the Grotesques, were as big an influence on me as anything I read while a teenager. Later I read other of his books and stories and even a collection of his late newspaper columns, sort of a Lake Woebegone collection of small town fictions, the Buck Fever Papers. When I imagine small town life from the early part of the last century and the late 19th, those are constructed that out Anderson's stories.
He had one of the more interesting deaths, peritonitis caused by having swallowed a toothpick, some think from a martini. He was an infamous drinker. I left that last detail out when I told my young niece why she should take the toothpick out of her mouth when she was about six. At least she learned the word peritonitis if nothing else.
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