Death in the Woods

Like many of Sherwood Anderson’s best-known short stories, “Death in the Woods” takes place in a small town in the Midwest. Based on the personal experiences of the author, this story describes the life of an old woman and her demise as she walks home from town one wintry day. Anderson wrote his published works during the first part of the 20th century, and this is the title story of a collection of short stories published in 1933. He is most well-known for his short story collections Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg, and he became influential to other great writers of his century, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Earlier editions of this story appeared in two other publications. This guide cites quotes by parts and paragraphs rather than page numbers. It references the original published version in his short story collection of the same name, Death in the Woods. The story itself has five parts told in a nonlinear fashion.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to unwanted sexual advances.

In the first part, the narrator, a young boy from a small town, describes an old woman’s early life as an orphan forced into indentured servitude for a German farmer and his wife. Her young life is rough, and she devotes it to feeding the family and taking care of the animals on the farm. She does this while fighting off the sexual advances of the farmer and enduring poor treatment by his suspicious wife.

Things look up for the old woman when another man, Jakes Grimes, shows interest in her. After Jake fights the farmer, Jake and the old woman get married. Eventually, the new Mrs. Grimes finds herself in the same situation as before—feeding an ungrateful husband and son and caring for the animals on their farm. They have a daughter, but for reasons unknown to the narrator, she dies early.

Part 2 discusses more of the woman's life with Jake Grimes. He is an unruly man, constantly in debt and often accused of stealing other people’s horses. He drinks often with his son, and they sometimes fight each other. By this time of her life, the old woman “had got the habit of silence” (Part 2, Paragraph 7) and just went about her duties on the farm, feeding the “horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men” (Part 2, Paragraph 15). On the day of her death, she makes her usual pilgrimage to the nearest town to trade for food, followed by four dogs from the farm. This part ends with a moment of civility from the town butcher, who shows her kindness and tells her how he truly feels about the men in her family. She seems so conditioned to her life that despite this kindness, her only thought is about getting home to feed those who rely on her.

On the way home, she sits down at the foot of a tree, near a clearing, to rest, only to fall asleep and freeze to death. Meanwhile, the dogs that follow her begin foraging and running around in circles in the clearing. To the narrator, this is a return to the wild as they embrace their inner wolf. Once the old woman completely passes, the dogs revert to survival mode and paw at the bag of food tied to her back, dragging her into the clearing in the process. By the time they wrench the pack from her corpse, her clothes are torn off and her body is face down in the snow.

The old woman is found “a day or two later” by a hunter, who misunderstands the scene. He later speaks to the men of the town, describing a young woman frozen in the snow (Part 4, Paragraph 3). A group, including the hunter, the town marshal, the narrator, and his brother, quickly assembles to investigate the scene.

Once they reach the clearing, the men gather around. Her corpse creates an air of mysticism for some of those present, and the narrator and his brother are clearly affected by it, as they have never seen a woman in a state of undress before. The snow and the cold add to her body’s youthful appearance, which make her skin pale and white.

The last part of the story details the fallout of her death. The husband and son are accused and found to have good alibis but are run out of town.

The narrator goes on to associate things that have happened in his life with the events in his story. He also admits that he has been building on the story of the old woman through fragments. He recounts that he worked for a German farmer once as a young man, and there was also a girl who worked there. She was frightened of the husband and hated by the wife. At one point in the story, he also mentions that he had experienced dogs circling around in the woods, waiting for him to pass on, but since he was a stronger, younger individual, he was able to survive. Additionally, he visits the old woman’s house later to find dogs there. The reader is left to wonder how much of his tale is true and how much of it was unintentional, or intentional, fabrication, based on some of his own experiences. His final thoughts are that he was never satisfied with the version of the story told by his brother, and that time and memory must fill in the details as he becomes older and understands the world better.