Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson, (b. Sept. 13, 1876,
Camden, Ohio, U.S.—d. March 8, 1941,
Colon, Panama), author who strongly
influenced American writing between
World Wars I and II, particularly the
technique of the short story. His
writing had an impact on such notable
writers as Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner, both of whom owe the first
publication of their books to his
efforts. His prose style, based on
everyday speech and derived from the
experimental writing of Gertrude Stein,
was markedly influential on the early
Hemingway—who parodied it cruelly in
Torrents of Spring (1926) to make a
clean break and become his own man.
One of seven children of a day labourer,
Anderson attended school intermittently
as a youth in Clyde, Ohio, and worked as
a newsboy, house painter, farmhand, and
racetrack helper. After a year at
Wittenberg Academy, a preparatory school
in Springfield, Ohio, he worked as an
advertising writer in Chicago until
1906, when he went back to Ohio and for
the next six years sought—without
success—to prosper as a businessman
while writing fiction in his spare time.
A paint manufacturer in Elyria, Ohio, he
left his office abruptly one day in 1912
and wandered off, turning up four days
later in Cleveland, disheveled and
mentally distraught. He later said he
staged this episode to get away from the
business world and devote himself to
literature.
Anderson went back to his advertising
job in Chicago and remained there until
he began to earn enough from his
published work to quit. Encouraged by
Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, and
Ben Hecht—leaders of the Chicago
literary movement—he began to contribute
experimental verse and short fiction to
The Little Review, The Masses, the Seven
Arts, and Poetry. Dell and Dreiser
arranged the publication of his first
two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916;
rev. 1921) and Marching Men (1917), both
written while he was still a
manufacturer. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was
his first mature book and made his
reputation as an author. Its
interrelated short sketches and tales
are told by a newspaper
reporter-narrator who is as emotionally
stunted in some ways as the people he
describes. His novels include Many
Marriages (1923), which stresses the
need for sexual fulfillment; Dark
Laughter (1925), which values the
“primitive” over the civilized; and
Beyond Desire (1932), a novel of
Southern textile mill labour struggles.
His best work is generally thought to be
in his short stories, collected in
Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg
(1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death
in the Woods (1933). Also valued are the
autobiographical sketches A Story
Teller’s Story (1924), Tar: A Midwest
Childhood (1926), and the posthumous
Memoirs (1942; critical edition 1969). A
selection of his Letters appeared in
1953.
