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Sherwood Anderson’s Grotesques in Thomas Boyd’s Points of Honor

Brian Bruce’s 2006 biography is appropriately titled, Thomas Boyd: Lost Author of the “Lost Generation.” Not many readers are familiar with Thomas Boyd, even though his Through the Wheat is generally considered the best literary depiction of American involvement in World War I. Contemporary reviewers in 1923 compared Boyd’s novel to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (Trout xvii–xviii), but an important difference between the two writers is that Boyd actually served in combat. He enlisted in the Marines while still a teenager when the United States declared war in 1917, participated in several major battles on the Western Front, and missed the Fourth Brigade’s last offensive before the Armistice of 1918 because of a mustard gas attack, inflicting injuries that precipitated his death at 36 in 1935. Boyd’s semi-autobiographical novel was republished by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000, which, combined with Bruce’s biography, renewed interest in Boyd’s writing. Through his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Boyd had the opportunity for inclusion within the circle of American authors affiliated with the Lost Generation, particularly during 1925 when Points of Honor was published. For various reasons – most likely his shift from war stories to historical, agrarian, and political subjects – Boyd never experienced major literary fame. Steven Trout’s republication of Points of Honor by the University of Alabama Press in 2018 has continued the momentum toward acknowledging Boyd as a significant writer in early-twentiethcentury American literature. In his introduction, Trout declares that “Boyd has yet to receive extensive reexamination” (269), and besides a few articles about the characterization of William Hicks, Boyd’s surrogate in Through the Wheat, and comparisons of the novel to other war stories, there is little scholarship published about Boyd. Trout does not situate Boyd within the American modernists of the 1920s, although he compares him with Ernest Hemingway (ix), but firmly classifies Points of Honor as a work of Naturalism (xxix): “Indeed, Points of Honor as a whole falls squarely in the camp of literary Naturalism (literature focused on deterministic forces such as, psychology, heredity, social class, culture, etc., that deny individual free will). Throughout, the book reflects the influence of fellow Midwestern Naturalists like Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, both of whom Boyd knew personally, and French novelist Emile Zola, the European progenitor of the movement” (xxix). Nonetheless, Boyd’s eleven stories resemble in style, structure, and characterization those in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919, which is also considered representative of American Naturalism even though the stories depict a thematic wasteland similar to settings portrayed in distinctly modernist texts. Both Anderson and Boyd create characters who share feelings of alienation even while they interact within populated communities, one in Midwest America and the other in Western Europe, and, in this manner, both authors portray “grotesques,” the distinction Anderson assigns to his characters, to personify their generation’s psychological angst and existential isolation. As Trout comments, Boyd’s characters are “so locked into patterns of typically destructive behavior that they, in a sense, seal their own fate” (xxix-xxx). An argument could, therefore, be made that Boyd deserves equitable canonical status to Anderson. In his study of the grotesque in Winesburg, Ohio, Robert Dunne contends that editors of literary 40 anthologies will likely exclude Anderson’s contribution in favor of works that are “more representative of America’s multicultural heritage” (A New xiii). Notwithstanding, both writers should be granted inclusion because of how they portray ideological dissonance, a thematic staple in modernist fiction. In “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” Louis Althusser explains how the ruling class promotes