Marching Men is the story of Norman "Beaut" McGregor, a young man discontented with the powerlessness and lack of personal ambition among the miners of his hometown.

The novel has since been reprinted several times by other publishers including a 1927 Russian translation, yet is generally forgotten by the reading public except as a step in the development of its author.

[1] Like Windy McPherson's Son, Sherwood Anderson wrote his second novel while he worked as an advertising copywriter in Elyria, Ohio between 1906 and 1913, several years before he published his first literary writing and a decade before he became an established writer.

[2] At least part of Marching Men was written in an attic room of Anderson's Elyria home, which he set up to escape familial demands and focus on writing.

[6] Combined with his later reading of works by Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, and possibly Jack London,[7] Anderson had inspiration for Marching Men that was both experiential and literary...

One day, in a break from the ordinary, the usually unsocial McGregor gives in to the urging of his neighbor Frank Turner, a barber and amateur violin-maker, and goes to a dance.

Back in Chicago, Edith Carson, who had gained a modicum of wealth through her shrewd business dealings, loans McGregor the money necessary for him to quit working full-time and attend school to become a lawyer, his long-time ambition.

In order to quell newspaper speculation as to their involvement, the political bosses decide to redirect the media's attention by framing and demonizing small-time thief Andy Brown, an acquaintance of McGregor.

The book ends that same night with a solitary David Ormsby, a foil to the stereotype of the ruthless businessman,[11] at his window overlooking the city, meditating on his life choices: "What if McGregor and his woman knew both roads?

[11][14] In addition to it being dedicated "To American Workingmen", one critic placed Marching Men as part of a "proletarian trend" alongside Ernst Toller's play Man and the Masses (1920).

[18] It is when McGregor comes back to Coal Creek to bury his mother and sees the usually jumbled miners marching in step as part of the funeral procession does he have an epiphany that together the workers are a powerful force, to be organized specifically by him.

[19] Indeed, this realization is foreshadowed in Chapter 3 of Book I[20] when as a young man he sees a troupe of marching soldiers disperse a rowdy mob of miner's (and, as a consequence, save his family's bakery) during a strike.

[21] Towards the end of the novel, the heretofore nascent power of the marching workers organized by McGregor is affirmed when the city's oligarchs deem it necessary to act against it.

[26] Finally, the frustrated mass of job-seekers McGregor encounters upon his arrival to the city is seen against the neat groups of marching men that excite a young reporter in Book VI.

It is ironic, critic Clarence B. Lindsay posits, that while McGregor is busy organizing the marching men, he (as opposed to the narrator) all but ignores the chaos in the city he is constantly traversing.

[35] In fact, Anderson elevates his protagonist to the level of the "Emersonian Great Man or Nietzschean Supermen ... "[7][36] making him the dream-object of women and envy of men from Coal Creek to Chicago.

To some critics McGregor's exceptionalism helps Marching Men read as a proletarian novel,[38] while others see in it an antecedent to the grotesqueness of the characters in Anderson's 1919 short story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio.

[40] Combining the ideas of an exceptional leader and unified workers has raised questions among critics concerning the parallels between the "militaristic impulse" in Marching Men and the fascism of the WWII-era,[41][42] a charge Anderson acknowledged in his posthumously published Memoirs.

[47] Others, like editor Francis Hackett wrote "Where Marching Men succeeds is in thrusting the greater American realities before us ..."[14] to which critic George Bernard Donlin, in his Dial review, adds "Mr. Anderson's book interested me chiefly as the expression of a vigorous and sincere mind ...".

Huebsch picked it up in 1921 following Anderson's success with Winesburg, Ohio, novel Poor White, and short story collection The Triumph of an Egg.