I am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I’ve found in America,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in a February 1922 letter to his friend Gertrude Stein, “and have been writing like a man gone mad.” Over a seven-week stay, the celebrated author simultaneously worked on a novel, a short-story collection, and his memoirs. New Orleans suited him and not just for the furious work pace it allowed. “Often I want to loaf and I want others to loaf with me, talk with me of themselves and their lives,” he wrote in a love letter to the city, published in a 1922 issue of the local Double Dealer literary journal. “Just why it isn’t the winter home of every sensitive artist in America, who can raise money enough to get here, I do not know.”  

Anderson took his own advice, returned to New Orleans in the summer of 1924, and rented an apartment with his newly married third wife, Elizabeth, in the Upper Pontalba Building. Many friends, the heaviest of heavyweights in American letters of the era, heeded Anderson’s call to visit the city (as well, no doubt, did many unremembered artists of all stripes). The Andersons welcomed Anita Loos, John Dos Passos, and Carl Sandburg to their crib, and wined and dined Stein and Alice B. Toklas at Antoine’s. William Faulkner crashed with the couple before renting a room of his own. Anderson meanwhile couldn’t help but tumble into another mad fit of writing, completing Dark Laughter, his fifth novel, his tenth book overall, in a two-month sprint.  

Published a century ago, its plot is both simple to summarize and difficult to describe. John Stockton, a white, middling, thirty-something-ish Chicago reporter with artistic pretensions, leaves his job, the city, and his wife for a spell of Mark Twain-inspired adventure: “a little voyage of discovery.” He buys a second-hand skiff and rows himself to New Orleans via the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Along his journey, he grows a beard and, à la Samuel Clemens, chooses a new name.  

Now known as Bruce Dudley, he returns incognito to his hometown of Old Harbor, Indiana, and finds work painting carriage wheels alongside a man named Sponge Martin. He’s seduced by a woman named Aline, wife of the town’s wealthiest man, Fred, owner of the carriage wheel factory in which John-now-Bruce works. Pregnant, the couple flees into the unknown. 

As stories of a man’s search for meaning go, this one is fairly conventional; it’s how Anderson chooses to tell this story that confounds. The novel repeats scenes and language, always from the same omnipresent narrator’s point of view, fashioning not quite a cubist structure—think of the many voices knitted to form a single cohesive story in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—but more a prismatic one. The account of John leaving his job, for instance, is told again and again, chapter by chapter, gradually introducing details (he grew up afraid of words, he wants to write poetry, his wife is the better artist) to eventually build the character that becomes Bruce. Turning the pages of Dark Laughter can feel not unlike reading multiple drafts—three hundred pages’ worth!—of the same short story. The repetition is a compelling but baffling exercise in storytelling.  

And then there’s the source of the novel’s title, which cannot go unmentioned. That laughter belongs to the book’s few, peripheral Black characters, whom Anderson allows but a single mode of thought and action: the expression of joy through singing, dancing, and, yes, laughing—often at the expense of misguided Bruce. They act as a Greek chorus, omniscient and wise, commenting as he continues to blow up his life. Though Anderson appears to share their judgment of Bruce, the author’s descriptions of Black Americans come off as reductive and racist, and the result is often plain bad writing (“The brown girl’s body was like the thick waving leaf of a young banana plant”).    

Despite how much New Orleans punctuated Anderson’s work life during this period, the city remains at the novel’s narrative fringe. Bruce spends just five months in New Orleans—covered in a single chapter of the book—not doing much besides bedding down in a cheap hovel crawling with cockroaches and subsisting on five-cent meals of bread and coffee. Still, Anderson-as-Bruce couldn’t help but rhapsodize the city: “it is very lovely.” 

Anderson would fall out of love with New Orleans before long. He couldn’t stand the heat and humidity and had grown weary with what he called the “half artists” who populated the Quarter. Of course, he was partly responsible for enticing those dilettantes to follow his lead. “I hope after this year we will never spend another summer in the city,” he wrote Stein in September 1925. 

The following month Boni & Liveright publishers released Dark Laughter to mixed reviews—“Its crude theme is shot through with astonishing flashes of insight,” wrote the New York Times—and a readership hungry for this strange slice of salaciousness. It would become an immediate success, his only bestseller. 

The novel also inspired a pair of parodies from two literary young lions. Ernest Hemingway, another Anderson mentee, called the book, in a letter to his mother, a “pretentious fake with two or three patches of real writing.” In 1926, he published a novella, The Torrents of Spring, an unmistakable parody of Anderson’s narrative and thematic affectations. That same year, Faulkner, with artist William Spratling, caricatured the “artful and crafty” French Quarter demimonde to which they belonged in Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles. Anderson looked at the book, according to his wife’s published memoirs, and “stated flatly, ‘It isn’t very funny.’”  

Anderson’s oeuvre is all but ignored today, except for Winesburg, Ohio, an earlier, once-forgotten short story cycle whose reputation was revived by a subsequent generation of writers and readers. Dark Laughter hardly deserves a similar revival. But the novel’s backstory—rather than its contents—is essential to understanding the French Quarter of the 1920s. Like John-turned-Bruce, Sherwood Anderson used New Orleans as a wellspring for personal reinvention. And he left behind an admirably ambitious book that’s easy to hate. 

Rien Fertel has been writing the Lost Lit column for eight years.