Dark Laughter is a little modern Odyssey. The plains of the Midwest, the great rivers, form the backdrop for the adventures of the protagonist, John Stockton, a man on the run from social conventions and in search of a new self. In a world suspended between the real and the possible, between the present and childhood, between biography and history, a constellation of unresolved characters and symbolic figures is stirred up. Sherwood Anderson is unquestionably one of the three or four titans of American literature. Dark Laughter is the novel of Midwestern America, the Ohio River Valley, the Mississippi, New Orleans and the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The expressive tension of language, the need for greater adherence to life, the urgency to love, to resolve the myth of childhood and to finally give meaning to one's existence, are some of the themes that run through a novel of great intensity, written in a modern, direct and essential language.