Dark Laughter Book

Dark Laughter

Dark Laughter (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Dark Laughter Being out to make a night of it they gathered wood to start a fire as soon as they had got to their favorite fishing place. Then everything was all right. Sponge had told Bruce dozens of times that his wife didn't mind anything. She's as tough as a fox terrier, he said. Two children had been born to the couple earlier in life and the oldest, a boy, had got his leg cut off hopping on a train. Sponge spent two hundred and eighty dollars on doctors but might as well have saved the money. The kid had died after six weeks of suffering. When he spoke of the other child, a girl playfully called Bugs Martin, Sponge got a little upset and chewed tobacco more vigorously than usual. She had been a rip-terror right from the start. No doing any thing with her. You couldn't keep her away from the boys. Sponge tried and his wife tried but what good did it do? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Dark Laughter

Dark Laughter (1925) is a novel by Sherwood Anderson. Inspired by his own decision to abandon his family and career in order to establish himself as a professional writer, Anderson explores the guilts, routines, desires, and disappointments driving the lives of many Americans in the early-twentieth century. Although he is known today for his story collection Winesburg, Ohio, a pioneering work of Modernist fiction admired for its plainspoken language and psychological detail, Anderson’s Dark Laughter was his only bestseller. Inspired by the stream of consciousness style of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Anderson produced a novel that remains controversial for its depictions of race, class, and sexuality. >“Bruce Dudley stood near a window that was covered with flecks of paint and through which could be faintly seen, first a pile of empty boxes, then a more or less littered factory yard running down to a steep bluff, and beyond the brown waters of the Ohio River.” Bruce, a factory worker in Old Harbor, Indiana, is your average working man. He lives a simple life, keeps a low profile, spends his money at the bar with his friends, and tries not to get fired. As far as anyone knows, there is nothing special about him whatsoever; he is a drifter who found his way to Old Harbor by chance and settled down to make himself some money. But Bruce was born in Old Harbor; raised on its streets and educated in its schools, he lived most of his life by another name: John Stockton, Indiana native turned Chicago reporter. Married with kids, he was happy as far as anyone could tell. Up until the day he left, he was still John Stockton, but the change that came over him late in life was too great to resist. He needed a new name, a new life. He wanted to start over in the place where he began. When an opportunity comes to work as a gardener for the factory owner’s wife, Bruce soon finds it impossible to resist her brazen advances. Dark Laughter is a tale of guilt, identity, and shame from master storyteller Sherwood Anderson. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.