Dark Laughter

First edition cover

Dark Laughter was Sherwood Anderson's 1925 novel which took up much the same theme as his 1923 novel Many Marriages, though he read James Joyce's Ulysses in between. The influence of Ulysses is clear in Dark Laughter. While Winesburg, Ohio is Anderson's best known work today, Dark Laughter was the only bestseller of Anderson's lifetime. It has been out of print since the early 1960s and some contemporary critics consider the novel a failure (among them Kim Townsend, the author of the most recent biography of Anderson, published in 1985)--a failure due, in large part, to what many today consider racist and sexist language and themes.

Ernest Hemingway parodied Dark Laughter in his early short work The Torrents of Spring. Hemingway's novella mocks the pretensions of Anderson's style and characters, and the parody ended the friendship between the young Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, his former mentor.