Sherwood
Anderson, the third of seven children, was born in Camden, Ohio in
1876. He left school at 14 and after various jobs served in the Spanish-American
War (1898-9).
After leaving the US Army, Anderson worked
as a manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. In 1908 he began
writing short stories and novels. He moved to Chicago where he found
work in an advertising agency. Anderson became friends with other
writers in Chicago such as Floyd Dell, Theodore
Dreiser, Ben Hecht and Carl
Sandburg.
Anderson shared his friends radical political views and in 1914 and
began having his work published in The
Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd
Dell and Max Eastman. This included
the stories about small-town life that were subsequently published
as Winesburg, Ohio.
Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's
Son was published in 1916. This was followed by the novel,
Marching Men (1917) and a collection
of prose poems, American Chants
(1918).
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson's
most important work, was published in 1919. The book, a collection
of 23 inter-related stories of small-town life,
features George Willard, a reporter for the local newspaper, who has
ambitions to become a famous writer.
Other books published by Anderson during this period included Poor
White (1920), The Triumph of the
Egg (1921), Many Marriages
(1923) and Horses and Men (1923).
Although considered to be a minor work by the critics, Anderson's
most commercial successful novel was Dark
Laughter (1925).
Anderson, whose autobiography, A Story Teller's
Story, was published in 1924, failed to recapture the standard
of the work produced in Winesburg, Ohio.
His later work such as Tar: A Midwest Childhood
(1926), Beyond Desire (1932) and
Death in the Woods (1933) failed
to make an impact on critics or the book-buying
public. Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis in Panama on 8th March,
1941.
(1)
Floyd Dell wrote about discovering the work
of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg and
Theodore Dreiser while the literary editor
of the Chicago Evening Post, in his autobiography, Homecoming
(1933)
I met Carl Sandburg, and he read some of his poems from manuscript.
They were all impressionistic, misty, soft-outlined, delicate; I remember
liking particularly the one about the fog that "comes on little
cat feet". Carl Sandburg had not struck yet the note he was soon
to strike in Chicago Poems.
I saw something of Theodore Dreiser, who was in Chicago for a while;
he said I was the best critic in America; but I had said he was a
great novelist, so it was only natural for him to think well of my
critical powers.
A new, hitherto unknown novelist swam into my ken, Sherwood Anderson,
with the manuscript of a novel, Windy MacPherson's Son, which
I immediately admired; it had things in it about the Middle West which
had never got into fiction. Sherwood Anderson worked in an advertising
agency, and loathed it.
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