Sherwood Anderson

American novelist and short-story writer.

• Born: September 13, 1876
• Birthplace: Camden, Ohio
• Died: March 8, 1941
• Place of death: Colón, Panama Canal Zone

Biography

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876. His wanderings began in boyhood as his family moved from town to town in Ohio. In a succession of jobs, his father ran a harness shop, worked in harness shops, and painted signs, each occupation bringing in relatively less money for his large family. Sherwood, an active young boy, sold newspapers, picked up odd jobs, and wandered around the Ohio towns that were to become the settings for his later stories and novels. Although he read avidly, he had finished only one year of high school when he went to Chicago, in 1896, to work as a day laborer. After serving in the Spanish-American War and attending a prep school for a short time, he returned to Chicago and worked for an advertising agency. He did well in business and soon moved to Elyria, Ohio, where he managed a factory and sold a roof paint called "Roof Fix." Outwardly, during those years, he led a conventional young businessman’s life, but at the same time he was trying—in poems, short stories, and novels—to record his puzzled impressions of American life.

Legend has it that Anderson simply walked out of his factory one afternoon in 1912, after deciding to leave industry for writing. Actually, the decision was neither that conscious nor that simple. The conflicts between life and his literary ambition had been growing for years, and he seemed to suffer a kind of breakdown. After leaving the factory, he wandered aimlessly for four days until he was discovered in Cleveland. Later in his career he would suggest the episode was a voluntary break with conventional life that he saw as necessary to establish himself as an artist, though his account changed over time. He and his family subsequently moved to Chicago, where he took a job in advertising, similar to what he had done before.

After more than a year, Anderson quit advertising for good. He and his wife were divorced, and he set himself upon a course as a serious and solitary writer. In Chicago, as a member of a literary group that included Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht, and stimulated by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry (founded in 1912) and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review (begun in 1914), Anderson found an artistic climate in which he could write.

His first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, the story of a midwestern boy’s revolt against his father and against his small hometown, appeared in 1916 but received little attention. Three years and several publications later, however, Anderson became well known and widely acclaimed following the publication of Winesburg, Ohio. The book is a loosely structured series of episodes dealing with life and character in a small midwestern town. Anderson portrayed, with enormous sympathy, the grim and quietly desperate lives in the small half-industrial town. The novel is centered on young George Willard as he learns to see and understand the town around him. Anderson concentrated on the weak, the characters beaten by life in a competitive and mechanical society.

Winesburg, Ohio made Anderson known as the authentic voice of the Midwest. The remarkable quality about this work of interrelated short stories is that a plot does not present itself. Anderson embarked here upon an experimental and extremely effective form of writing that was original and peculiar to him. His stories explored the psychological unconscious of his characters, which was new territory in 1919; they were often grasping to find the meaning of sex, love, life, and death. Anderson did this with a deftness and elegant simplicity that has been admired and imitated by a succession of twentieth century writers including Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, then later by Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver.

Anderson’s distinguished contemporaries Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, and Paul Rosenfeld admired and befriended him. Other writers, such as Dreiser and Hart Crane, valued his power and insight. Poor White, Anderson’s fourth novel, dealt with American society more comprehensively in presenting the wanderings of a lonely, inarticulate young man. The novel was well received; this success, in combination with the short stories in The Triumph of the Egg and Horses and Men, made Anderson one of the most frequently honored figures on the American literary scene in the early 1920s. He received the first annual award given by The Dial in December, 1921. His fame spread to Europe, and a few years later Virginia Woolf wrote that "of all American novelists the most discussed and read in England at the present moment are probably Mr. Sherwood Anderson and Mr. Sinclair Lewis."

About this time Anderson began to feel the influence of D. H. Lawrence strongly. He read Lawrence repeatedly and incorporated a stronger sexual motif into his own writings. Many Marriages expresses the point of view that Americans are crippled by the attitude that sexual discussion and experience should be repressed. Dark Laughter, in many ways his best novel, uses sex as one of several means for the hero to scrape away the superficialities of modern cosmopolitan life and return to the primitive and basic meanings of human experience.

After becoming successful, Anderson wandered around both the United States and Europe, finally settling in Marion, Virginia, where he edited two newspapers—one Republican, one Democrat. He continued to write, although after 1925 his work never reached the artistic heights or received the public acclaim of his earlier work. He died at Colón, in the Panama Canal Zone, while on a US State Department mission, on March 8, 1941.

Critics during the 1920s talked of the depth of his insight, of his warmth and concern for humanity, and of his genuine quality as a spokesman for the frustrations of unhappy, unsuccessful people. In the 1940s and 1950s a wide variety of criticism was unleashed against Anderson, some valid and some not. He is still regarded as a writer of warmth and sympathy who managed to create a new type of fiction through which to present his characters doomed by society. The short stories survive as the best of Anderson’s work. Many of them could fall into the category of prose poetry. The speed and ease with which his characters reach an epiphany or deep emotional experience are the trademarks that made Anderson an extremely important and innovative writer of the twentieth century.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Windy McPherson’s Son, 1916

Marching Men, 1917

Poor White, 1920

Many Marriages, 1923

Dark Laughter, 1925

Beyond Desire, 1932

Kit Brandon, 1936

Short Fiction:

Winesburg, Ohio, 1919 (sometimes considered a novel)

The Triumph of the Egg, 1921

Horses and Men, 1923

Death in the Woods, and Other Stories, 1933

The Sherwood Anderson Reader, 1947

Drama:

Plays: Winesburg and Others, pb. 1937

Poetry:

Mid-American Chants, 1918

A New Testament, 1927

Nonfiction:

A Story Teller’s Story, 1924

The Modern Writer, 1925

Tar: A Midwest Childhood, 1926

Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, 1926

Hello Towns!, 1929

Perhaps Women, 1931

No Swank, 1934

Puzzled America, 1935

Home Town, 1940

Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, 1942

The Letters of Sherwood Anderson, 1953

Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters, 1984

Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, 1916-1933, 1985

Bibliography

Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. This critical biography argues that all of Anderson’s work, not just Winesburg, Ohio, must be considered when attempting to understand Anderson’s career and his place in the literary canon.

Appel, Paul P. Homage to Sherwood Anderson: 1876-1941. Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Author, 1970. A collection of essays originally published in homage to Anderson after his death in 1941. Among the contributors are Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, and William Saroyan. Also includes Anderson’s previously unpublished letters and his essay "The Modern Writer," which had been issued as a limited edition in 1925.

Bassett, John E. Sherwood Anderson: An American Career. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. Bassett reevaluates the accomplishments in Winesburg, Ohio and Anderson’s other novels and short stories, but focuses more than previous studies on his nonfiction, autobiographical, and journalistic writing. Also discusses how Anderson coped with the cultural changes of his time.

Campbell, Hilbert H., and Charles E. Modlin, eds. Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1976. Written for Anderson’s centenary, these eleven previously unpublished essays were solicited by the editors. Some of the essays explore Anderson’s relationship with other artists, including Edgar Lee Masters, Henry Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, and J. J. Lankes.

Dunne, Robert. A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005. Offers a new interpretation of Anderson’s early fiction by looking at it from a postmodern theoretical perspective, especially from poststructuralist approaches. Describes how the early novels laid the groundwork for Winesburg, Ohio before it examines that work.

Ellis, James. "Sherwood Anderson’s Fear of Sexuality: Horses, Men, and Homosexuality." Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Fall, 1993): 595–601. On the basis of biographer Kim Townsend’s suggestion that Anderson sought out male spiritual friendships because he felt that sexuality would debase the beauty of woman, Ellis examines Anderson’s treatment of sexuality as a threat in male relationships in "I Want to Know Why" and "The Man Who Became a Woman."

Hansen, Tom. "Who’s a Fool? A Rereading of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘I’m a Fool.’" The Midwest Quarterly 38 (Summer, 1997): 372–379. Argues that the narrator is the victim of his own self-importance and is thus played for a fool. Discusses class consciousness and conflict in the story.

Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. Toronto, Ont.: William Sloane, 1951. This highly biographical work explores why Anderson, a writer with only one crucial book, remains an outstanding artist in American literature. The chapters on Winesburg, Ohio and the short stories are noteworthy; both were later published in collections of essays on Anderson.

Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Introduction to Anderson’s short stories examines his search for an appropriate form and his experimentations with form in the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, as well as the short stories that appeared before and after that book. Deals with Anderson’s belief that the most authentic history of life is a history of moments when a person truly lives, as well as his creation of the grotesque as an American type that also reflects a new social reality. Includes comments from Anderson’s essays, letters, and notebooks, as well as brief commentaries by five other critics.

Rideout, Walter B. Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America. 2 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2007. A thoroughly researched biography that draws on existing biographies of Anderson as well as interviews with his friends and family members.

Rideout, Walter B., ed. Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Treats Anderson from a variety of perspectives: as prophet, storyteller, and maker of American myths. Three of the essays deal with Winesburg, Ohio, including a discussion of how Anderson wrote the book. Includes an appreciation of Anderson’s work by William Faulkner and a chronology of significant dates.

Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Provides commentary on every story in Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, and Death in the Woods. Small summarizes the interpretations of other critics and supplies historical and biographical background, accounts of how the stories were written, the period in which they were published, and their reception.

Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. In this biography of Sherwood Anderson, Townsend focuses, in part, on how Anderson’s life appears in his writing. Supplemented by twenty-six photographs and a useful bibliography of Anderson’s work.

White, Ray Lewis, ed. The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson: Essays in Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. This collection of essays treats an important variety of subjects, including isolation, Freudianism, and socialism in Anderson’s texts, as well as his development as an artist.