Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876,
to Irwin and Emma Smith Anderson. His father was an itinerant
harness maker and sometime house painter more interested in
swapping barroom tales of Civil War adventures than in providing
for a wife and seven children. In 1883 the Andersons settled in
Clyde, Ohio, a small town in the heartland of America that later
served as a model for Winesburg. There young Sherwood, nicknamed
'Jobby' because he was always ready to work, held any number of odd
jobs to help support the family. Although he received a spotty
education and never finished high school, Anderson possessed an
entrepreneurial spirit and always imagined a glorious future for
himself. A year or two after his mother's death in 1895, he
journeyed to Chicago and found employment in a warehouse but was
soon called up for military service in Cuba at the end of the
Spanish-American War. Upon his return, he attended Wittenberg
College in Springfield, Ohio, for a year.
In the summer of 1900 Anderson took a job back in Chicago as an
advertising copywriter. He satisfied his growing interest in
creative writing by turning out essays, sketches, and stories in
his spare time. Following his marriage in 1904 to Cornelia Lane
(with whom he would have three children), Anderson became head of a
mailorder firm in Cleveland and subsequently established his own
business in Elyria, Ohio.
Partly as an escape from growing marital and financial problems, he
began writing novels around 1910. 'I am one,' he said, 'who loves,
like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a
great pile of white paper that may be scrawled upon always gladdens
me.'
Nevertheless, in November 1912 Anderson suffered a complete nervous
breakdown and soon returned to Chicago to resume a career in
advertising. Over the next years he became one of the rebellious
writers (others included Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht) and cultural
bohemians taking part in the so-called 'Chicago Renaissance.' In
1916 he published some of the Winesburg tales in several literary
magazines as well as his first novel, the autobiographical Windy
McPherson's Son. That same year his marriage ended in divorce, and
Anderson wed Tennessee Mitchell, an adventurous, emancipated
sculptor. A second novel, Marching Men, followed in 1917, and a
book of free-verse poems, Mid-American Chants, came out in
1918.
But it was the appearance of Winesburg, Ohio a year later that
secured Anderson's reputation. 'Nothing quite like it has ever been
done in America,' said H. L. Mencken of the book that broke all
conventions as it laid bare the lives of inhabitants (or
'grotesques' as Anderson called them) of a small Midwestern town.
Critic Malcolm Cowley assessed the author's achievement- 'Anderson
made a great noise when he published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. The
older critics scolded him, the younger ones praised him, as a man
of the changing hour, yet he managed in that early work and others
to be relatively timeless. . . . He soon became a writer's writer,
the only storyteller of his generation who left his mark on the
style and vision of the generation that followed. Hemingway,
Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Saroyan, Henry Miller . . .
each of these owes an unmistakable debt to Anderson.' The author
himself reflected- 'With the publication of Winesburg I felt I had
really begun to write out of the repressed, muddled life about
me.'
The 1920s proved, in part, a productive and rewarding period for
Anderson. He soon turned out Poor White (1920), a novel that
depicted a small Midwestern town changed by the industrial
revolution. In the summer of 1921 he traveled to Europe and met
James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. The Triumph of
the Egg, more of Anderson's naturalistic impressions of American
life in tales and poems, was published to critical acclaim in the
fall of that ye
"When he calls himself a 'poor scribbler' don't believe him. He is
not a poor scribbler . . . he is a very great writer."--Ernest
Hemingway
"Winesburg, Ohio, when it first appeared, kept me up a whole night
in a steady crescendo of emotion."--Hart Crane
"As a rule, first books show more bravado than anything else,
unless it be tediousness. But there is neither of these qualities
in Winesburg, Ohio. . . . These people live and breathe: they are
beautiful."--E. M. Forster
"Winesburg, Ohio is an extraordinarily good book. But it is not
fiction. It is poetry."--Rebecca West
"When he calls himself a 'poor scribbler' don't believe him. He is
not a poor scribbler . . . he is a very great writer."--Ernest
Hemingway
"Winesburg, Ohio, when it first appeared, kept me up a whole night
in a steady crescendo of emotion."--Hart Crane
"As a rule, first books show more bravado than anything else,
unless it be tediousness. But there is neither of these qualities
in Winesburg, Ohio. . . . These people live and breathe: they are
beautiful."--E. M. Forster
"Winesburg, Ohio is an extraordinarily good book. But it is not
fiction. It is poetry."--Rebecca West
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