Marching Men: A Progressive Era Novel of Industrial Chicago, Labor Unrest, Masculine Ambition, and Modern Alienation

Published in 1917, Marching Men traces the rise of Beaut McGregor, a coal-town outsider who carries the brutal energies of industrial America into Chicago, where his yearning for order becomes a strange movement of disciplined men marching through the city. Anderson's prose is stark, symbolic, and restless, combining social realism with an emergent modernist concern for alienation, mass behavior, and the spiritual vacancy beneath American progress. Sherwood Anderson, later celebrated for Winesburg, Ohio, drew on his own intimate knowledge of Midwestern towns, factories, business offices, and urban ambition. Having worked in advertising and manufacturing before abandoning conventional success for literature, Anderson understood both the seductions and dehumanizing pressures of modern commerce. Marching Men reflects his early attempt to diagnose a society rich in motion but poor in meaning. This novel is recommended for readers interested in American literary modernism before its canonical moment, and in fiction that interrogates labor, masculinity, crowd psychology, and the making of public power. Though less famous than Anderson's short fiction, it remains a compelling and intellectually provocative work.