From the jacket flap: "Tar is written in third person, as the story of Tar Moorhead, who in childhood comes to an awareness of the poverty, the ugliness, the suffering, and, ultimately, of the latent beauty of small-town life in late-nineteenth-century Ohio. It remains a basic document for students of Sherwood Anderson's life—one of the greatest 'representative lives' in American literature. ... In this volume, biographical and bibliographical annotations, with cross references to A Storyteller's Story and Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, help establish the factual framework for Tar. Included is a discussion by William Alfred Sutton—who has devoted special study to Anderson's youth—of the recently found diaries of the writer's parents. Also included is an earlier unpublished version of 'The Death in the Forest,' the masterful Anderson short story that appears in Tar"