The Library of America • Story of the Week

Reprinted from Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

(The Library of America, 2012), pages 230–40.
First published in The Dial (March 1920) as “The Triumph of the Egg.”
Reprinted in the collection The Triumph of the Egg (1921).

The Egg

M y father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheer-

ful, kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he
worked as a farm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth
whose place lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a
horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove into town to
spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farm-hands.
In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben
Head’s saloon—crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting
farm-hands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar.
At ten o’clock father drove home along a lonely country road,
made his horse comfortable for the night and himself went to
bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at that time no
notion of trying to rise in the world.
It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married
my mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the follow-
ing spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Some-
thing happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The
American passion for getting up in the world took possession
of them.
It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a
school-teacher she had no doubt read books and magazines.
She had, I presume, read of how Garfield, Lincoln, and other
Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness and as I lay
beside her—in the days of her lying-in—she may have dreamed
that I would some day rule men and cities. At any rate she in-
duced father to give up his place as a farm-hand, sell his horse
and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was
a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes.
For herself she wanted nothing. For father and myself she was
incurably ambitious.
The first venture into which the two people went turned out
badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs’s
Road, eight miles from Bidwell, and launched into chicken
raising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first
impressions of life there. From the beginning they were im-
pressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man
230
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 t he egg 231

inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact

that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of
childhood were spent on a chicken farm.
One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the
many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born
out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as
you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously
naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of
your father’s brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other
names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes
sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended
to serve God’s mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity.
The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the
dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably
complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken
farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dread-
fully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the
journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so
dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one
up in one’s judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they
wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then
walk under the wheels of a wagon—to go squashed and dead
back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes
must be spent for curative powders. In later life I have seen
how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to
be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intended to be
read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowl-
edge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declares
that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own
a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for
you. Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your
faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the
world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over
evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written
concerning the hen. It was not written for you.
I, however, digress. My tale does not primarily concern itself
with the hen. If correctly told it will centre on the egg. For ten
years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm
pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another.
They moved into the town of Bidwell, Ohio and embarked in

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 232 t he t r iumph of t he egg

the restaurant business. After ten years of worry with incuba-

tors that did not hatch, and with tiny—and in their own way
lovely—balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullethood
and from that into dead henhood, we threw all aside and pack-
ing our belongings on a wagon drove down Griggs’s Road
toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place
from which to start on our upward journey through life.
We must have been a sad looking lot, not, I fancy, unlike
refugees fleeing from a battlefield. Mother and I walked in the
road. The wagon that contained our goods had been borrowed
for the day from Mr. Albert Griggs, a neighbor. Out of its sides
stuck the legs of cheap chairs and at the back of the pile of
beds, tables, and boxes filled with kitchen utensils was a crate
of live chickens, and on top of that the baby carriage in which
I had been wheeled about in my infancy. Why we stuck to the
baby carriage I don’t know. It was unlikely other children
would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have
few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of
the facts that make life so discouraging.
Father rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-headed
man of forty-five, a little fat and from long association with
mother and the chickens he had become habitually silent and
discouraged. All during our ten years on the chicken farm he
had worked as a laborer on neighboring farms and most of the
money he had earned had been spent for remedies to cure
chicken diseases, on Wilmer’s White Wonder Cholera Cure or
Professor Bidlow’s Egg Producer or some other preparations
that mother found advertised in the poultry papers. There
were two little patches of hair on father’s head just above his
ears. I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him
when he had gone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sun-
day afternoons in the winter. I had at that time already begun
to read books and have notions of my own and the bald path
that led over the top of his head was, I fancied, something
like a broad road, such a road as Caesar might have made on
which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of
an unknown world. The tufts of hair that grew above father’s
ears were, I thought, like forests. I fell into a half-sleeping,
half-waking state and dreamed I was a tiny thing going along

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 t he egg 233

the road into a far beautiful place where there were no chicken
farms and where life was a happy eggless affair.
One might write a book concerning our flight from the
chicken farm into town. Mother and I walked the entire eight
miles—she to be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I
to see the wonders of the world. On the seat of the wagon
beside father was his greatest treasure. I will tell you of that.
On a chicken farm where hundreds and even thousands of
chickens come out of eggs surprising things sometimes hap-
pen. Grotesques are born out of eggs as out of people. The
accident does not often occur—perhaps once in a thousand
births. A chicken is, you see, born that has four legs, two pairs
of wings, two heads or what not. The things do not live. They
go quickly back to the hand of their maker that has for a mo-
ment trembled. The fact that the poor little things could not
live was one of the tragedies of life to father. He had some sort
of notion that if he could but bring into henhood or rooster-
hood a five-legged hen or a two-headed rooster his fortune
would be made. He dreamed of taking the wonder about to
county fairs and of growing rich by exhibiting it to other farm-
hands.
At any rate he saved all the little monstrous things that had
been born on our chicken farm. They were preserved in alco-
hol and put each in its own glass bottle. These he had carefully
put into a box and on our journey into town it was carried on
the wagon seat beside him. He drove the horses with one hand
and with the other clung to the box. When we got to our
destination the box was taken down at once and the bottles
removed. All during our days as keepers of a restaurant in the
town of Bidwell, Ohio, the grotesques in their little glass bot-
tles sat on a shelf back of the counter. Mother sometimes pro-
tested but father was a rock on the subject of his treasure. The
grotesques were, he declared, valuable. People, he said, liked
to look at strange and wonderful things.
Did I say that we embarked in the restaurant business in the
town of Bidwell, Ohio? I exaggerated a little. The town itself
lay at the foot of a low hill and on the shore of a small river.
The railroad did not run through the town and the station was
a mile away to the north at a place called Pickleville. There had

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 234 t he t r iumph of t he egg

been a cider mill and pickle factory at the station, but before
the time of our coming they had both gone out of business. In
the morning and in the evening busses came down to the sta-
tion along a road called Turner’s Pike from the hotel on the
main street of Bidwell. Our going to the out of the way place
to embark in the restaurant business was mother’s idea. She
talked of it for a year and then one day went off and rented an
empty store building opposite the railroad station. It was her
idea that the restaurant would be profitable. Travelling men,
she said, would be always waiting around to take trains out of
town and town people would come to the station to await in-
coming trains. They would come to the restaurant to buy
pieces of pie and drink coffee. Now that I am older I know that
she had another motive in going. She was ambitious for me.
She wanted me to rise in the world, to get into a town school
and become a man of the towns.
At Pickleville father and mother worked hard as they always
had done. At first there was the necessity of putting our place
into shape to be a restaurant. That took a month. Father built
a shelf on which he put tins of vegetables. He painted a sign
on which he put his name in large red letters. Below his name
was the sharp command—“eat here”—that was so seldom
obeyed. A show case was bought and filled with cigars and to-
bacco. Mother scrubbed the floor and the walls of the room. I
went to school in the town and was glad to be away from the
farm and from the presence of the discouraged, sad-looking
chickens. Still I was not very joyous. In the evening I walked
home from school along Turner’s Pike and remembered the
children I had seen playing in the town school yard. A troop of
little girls had gone hopping about and singing. I tried that.
Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one
leg. “Hippity Hop To The Barber Shop,” I sang shrilly. Then I
stopped and looked doubtfully about. I was afraid of being
seen in my gay mood. It must have seemed to me that I was
doing a thing that should not be done by one who, like myself,
had been raised on a chicken farm where death was a daily
visitor.
Mother decided that our restaurant should remain open at
night. At ten in the evening a passenger train went north past
our door followed by a local freight. The freight crew had

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 t he egg 235

switching to do in Pickleville and when the work was done

they came to our restaurant for hot coffee and food. Some-
times one of them ordered a fried egg. In the morning at four
they returned north-bound and again visited us. A little trade
began to grow up. Mother slept at night and during the day
tended the restaurant and fed our boarders while father slept.
He slept in the same bed mother had occupied during the
night and I went off to the town of Bidwell and to school.
During the long nights, while mother and I slept, father
cooked meats that were to go into sandwiches for the lunch
baskets of our boarders. Then an idea in regard to getting up
in the world came into his head. The American spirit took hold
of him. He also became ambitious.
In the long nights when there was little to do father had
time to think. That was his undoing. He decided that he had
in the past been an unsuccessful man because he had not been
cheerful enough and that in the future he would adopt a
cheerful outlook on life. In the early morning he came upstairs
and got into bed with mother. She woke and the two talked.
From my bed in the corner I listened.
It was father’s idea that both he and mother should try to
entertain the people who came to eat at our restaurant. I can-
not now remember his words, but he gave the impression of
one about to become in some obscure way a kind of public
entertainer. When people, particularly young people from the
town of Bidwell, came into our place, as on very rare occasions
they did, bright entertaining conversation was to be made.
From father’s words I gathered that something of the jolly inn-
keeper effect was to be sought. Mother must have been doubt-
ful from the first, but she said nothing discouraging. It was
father’s notion that a passion for the company of himself and
mother would spring up in the breasts of the younger people of
the town of Bidwell. In the evening bright happy groups would
come singing down Turner’s Pike. They would troop shouting
with joy and laughter into our place. There would be song and
festivity. I do not mean to give the impression that father spoke
so elaborately of the matter. He was as I have said an uncom-
municative man. “They want some place to go. I tell you they
want some place to go,” he said over and over. That was as far
as he got. My own imagination has filled in the blanks.

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 236 t he t r iumph of t he egg

For two or three weeks this notion of father’s invaded our

house. We did not talk much, but in our daily lives tried ear-
nestly to make smiles take the place of glum looks. Mother
smiled at the boarders and I, catching the infection, smiled at
our cat. Father became a little feverish in his anxiety to please.
There was no doubt, lurking somewhere in him, a touch of the
spirit of the showman. He did not waste much of his ammuni-
tion on the railroad men he served at night but seemed to be
waiting for a young man or woman from Bidwell to come in to
show what he could do. On the counter in the restaurant there
was a wire basket kept always filled with eggs, and it must have
been before his eyes when the idea of being entertaining was
born in his brain. There was something pre-natal about the
way eggs kept themselves connected with the development of
his idea. At any rate an egg ruined his new impulse in life. Late
one night I was awakened by a roar of anger coming from fa-
ther’s throat. Both mother and I sat upright in our beds. With
trembling hands she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by
her head. Downstairs the front door of our restaurant went
shut with a bang and in a few minutes father tramped up the
stairs. He held an egg in his hand and his hand trembled as
though he were having a chill. There was a half insane light in
his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I was sure he intended throw-
ing the egg at either mother or me. Then he laid it gently on
the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees beside
mother’s bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away
by his grief, cried with him. The two of us filled the little up-
stairs room with our wailing voices. It is ridiculous, but of the
picture we made I can remember only the fact that mother’s
hand continually stroked the bald path that ran across the top
of his head. I have forgotten what mother said to him and how
she induced him to tell her of what had happened downstairs.
His explanation also has gone out of my mind. I remember
only my own grief and fright and the shiny path over father’s
head glowing in the lamp light as he knelt by the bed.
As to what happened downstairs. For some unexplainable
reason I know the story as well as though I had been a witness
to my father’s discomfiture. One in time gets to know many
unexplainable things. On that evening young Joe Kane, son of
a merchant of Bidwell, came to Pickleville to meet his father,

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 t he egg 237

who was expected on the ten o’clock evening train from the
South. The train was three hours late and Joe came into our
place to loaf about and to wait for its arrival. The local freight
train came in and the freight crew were fed. Joe was left alone
in the restaurant with father.
From the moment he came into our place the Bidwell young
man must have been puzzled by my father’s actions. It was his
notion that father was angry at him for hanging around. He
noticed that the restaurant keeper was apparently disturbed by
his presence and he thought of going out. However, it began
to rain and he did not fancy the long walk to town and back.
He bought a five-cent cigar and ordered a cup of coffee. He
had a newspaper in his pocket and took it out and began to
read. “I’m waiting for the evening train. It’s late,” he said
apologetically.
For a long time father, whom Joe Kane had never seen before,
remained silently gazing at his visitor. He was no doubt suffer-
ing from an attack of stage fright. As so often happens in life
he had thought so much and so often of the situation that now
confronted him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence.
For one thing, he did not know what to do with his hands.
He thrust one of them nervously over the counter and shook
hands with Joe Kane. “How-de-do,” he said. Joe Kane put his
newspaper down and stared at him. Father’s eye lighted on the
basket of eggs that sat on the counter and he began to talk.
“Well,” he began hesitatingly, “well, you have heard of Chris-
topher Columbus, eh?” He seemed to be angry. “That Christo-
pher Columbus was a cheat,” he declared emphatically. “He
talked of making an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did,
and then he went and broke the end of the egg.”
My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the
duplicity of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore.
He declared it was wrong to teach children that Christopher
Columbus was a great man when, after all, he cheated at the
critical moment. He had declared he would make an egg stand
on end and then when his bluff had been called he had done a
trick. Still grumbling at Columbus, father took an egg from
the basket on the counter and began to walk up and down. He
rolled the egg between the palms of his hands. He smiled ge-
nially. He began to mumble words regarding the effect to be

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 238 t he t r iumph of t he egg

produced on an egg by the electricity that comes out of the

human body. He declared that without breaking its shell and
by virtue of rolling it back and forth in his hands he could
stand the egg on its end. He explained that the warmth of his
hands and the gentle rolling movement he gave the egg cre-
ated a new centre of gravity, and Joe Kane was mildly inter-
ested. “I have handled thousands of eggs,” father said. “No
one knows more about eggs than I do.”
He stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. He
tried the trick again and again, each time rolling the egg be-
tween the palms of his hands and saying the words regarding
the wonders of electricity and the laws of gravity. When after a
half hour’s effort he did succeed in making the egg stand for a
moment he looked up to find that his visitor was no longer
watching. By the time he had succeeded in calling Joe Kane’s
attention to the success of his effort the egg had again rolled
over and lay on its side.
Afire with the showman’s passion and at the same time a
good deal disconcerted by the failure of his first effort, father
now took the bottles containing the poultry monstrosities
down from their place on the shelf and began to show them to
his visitor. “How would you like to have seven legs and two
heads like this fellow?” he asked, exhibiting the most remark-
able of his treasures. A cheerful smile played over his face. He
reached over the counter and tried to slap Joe Kane on the
shoulder as he had seen men do in Ben Head’s saloon when
he was a young farm-hand and drove to town on Saturday
evenings. His visitor was made a little ill by the sight of the
body of the terribly deformed bird floating in the alcohol in
the bottle and got up to go. Coming from behind the counter
father took hold of the young man’s arm and led him back to
his seat. He grew a little angry and for a moment had to turn
his face away and force himself to smile. Then he put the bottles
back on the shelf. In a outburst of generosity he fairly com-
pelled Joe Kane to have a fresh cup of coffee and another cigar
at his expense. Then he took a pan and filling it with vinegar,
taken from a jug that sat beneath the counter, he declared
himself about to do a new trick. “I will heat this egg in this pan
of vinegar,” he said. “Then I will put it through the neck of a
bottle without breaking the shell. When the egg is inside the

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 t he egg 239

bottle it will resume its normal shape and the shell will become
hard again. Then I will give the bottle with the egg in it to
you. You can take it about with you wherever you go. People
will want to know how you got the egg in the bottle. Don’t tell
them. Keep them guessing. That is the way to have fun with
this trick.”
Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided
that the man who confronted him was mildly insane but harm-
less. He drank the cup of coffee that had been given him and
began to read his paper again. When the egg had been heated
in vinegar father carried it on a spoon to the counter and going
into a back room got an empty bottle. He was angry because
his visitor did not watch him as he began to do his trick, but
nevertheless went cheerfully to work. For a long time he
struggled, trying to get the egg to go through the neck of the
bottle. He put the pan of vinegar back on the stove, intending
to reheat the egg, then picked it up and burned his fingers.
After a second bath in the hot vinegar the shell of the egg had
been softened a little but not enough for his purpose. He
worked and worked and a spirit of desperate determination
took possession of him. When he thought that at last the trick
was about to be consummated the delayed train came in at
the station and Joe Kane started to go nonchalantly out at the
door. Father made a last desperate effort to conquer the egg
and make it do the thing that would establish his reputation as
one who knew how to entertain guests who came into his res-
taurant. He worried the egg. He attempted to be somewhat
rough with it. He swore and the sweat stood out on his fore-
head. The egg broke under his hand. When the contents
spurted over his clothes, Joe Kane, who had stopped at the
door, turned and laughed.
A roar of anger rose from my father’s throat. He danced and
shouted a string of inarticulate words. Grabbing another egg
from the basket on the counter, he threw it, just missing the
head of the young man as he dodged through the door and
escaped.
Father came upstairs to mother and me with an egg in his
hand. I do not know what he intended to do. I imagine he had
some idea of destroying it, of destroying all eggs, and that he
intended to let mother and me see him begin. When, however,

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he got into the presence of mother something happened to

him. He laid the egg gently on the table and dropped on his
knees by the bed as I have already explained. He later decided
to close the restaurant for the night and to come upstairs and
get into bed. When he did so he blew out the light and after
much muttered conversation both he and mother went to
sleep. I suppose I went to sleep also, but my sleep was troubled.
I awoke at dawn and for a long time looked at the egg that lay
on the table. I wondered why eggs had to be and why from the
egg came the hen who again laid the egg. The question got
into my blood. It has stayed there, I imagine, because I am the
son of my father. At any rate, the problem remains unsolved in
my mind. And that, I conclude, is but another evidence of the
complete and final triumph of the egg—at least as far as my
family is concerned.

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