Hands
By Sherwood Anderson
Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeks, he cold see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Bidlebaum, comb you hair, it's falling into your eyes," commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.
셔우드 앤더슨은 미국의 소설가이다. 오하이오 주 캠던에서 마구직공의 아들로 태어났다. 학교교육도 제대로 받지 못한 채 1896년 시카고로 가서 노동자가 되었다. 한때 에스파냐 전쟁에 참가했다가 귀국하자 카피 라이터가 되는 한편, 문학에 흥미를 갖고 샌드버그 드라이저, 델 등의 시카고 그룹에 참여하여 소설을 발표했다