One morning, a successful businessman Andersen left his office, never to return there again. For two days he wandered around the surrounding area unconscious, and when his sanity returned, dreams of another, spiritually rich life, suppressed by him for many years, prevailed. Rejecting the prospect of respectability and commercial success, he embarked on the path of an artist, full of vicissitudes, and his entire subsequent biography became an example of devotion to the thankless craft of writing. Thanks to this, Anderson in the American consciousness turned into a figure of almost mythical proportions: his fate embodied the half-conscious desire for liberation characteristic of every “average American.” CONTENTS: S. Anderson. In leg! (translation by M.G.Volosov and E.M.Salmanova) (5).ADDITIONS.Anderson. Choose the right war (translation by E.M. Sayamanova) (295). I. Howe. Success and its consequences (translation by E.M. Salmanova) (322). Several letters from Sherwood Anderson to Marietta Finley, Waldo Frank and Karl Anderson (translation by E.M. Salmanova) (347). APPENDICES by E.M. Salmanova. Escape from chaos (365). Notes (compiled by E.M. Salmanov) (419).