Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson
Anderson in 1933
Occupation	Author
Notable works	Winesburg, Ohio
Signature

Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz, among others.

Early life

Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven children of Erwin M. and Emma S. Anderson. After Erwin's business failed, the family was forced to move frequently, finally settling down at Clyde, Ohio, in 1884.

Partly as a result of these misfortunes, young Sherwood found various odd jobs to help his family, which earned him the nickname "Jobby." He left school at age 14.

Anderson moved to Chicago near his brother Karl's home and worked as a manual laborer until near the turn of the century, when he enlisted in the United States Army. He was called up but did not see action in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war, in 1900, he enrolled at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a job as a copywriter in Chicago and became more successful.

In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio family. He fathered three children while living in Cleveland, Ohio, and later Elyria, Ohio, where he managed a mail-order business and paint manufacturing firms.

In November 1912 he suffered a mental breakdown and disappeared for four days. He was found in a drugstore in Cleveland, having walked almost thirty miles. Soon after, he left his position as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and three small children to pursue the writer's life of creativity. Anderson described the entire episode as "escaping from his materialistic existence," which garnered praise from many young writers, who used his "courage" as an example.

Anderson moved back to Chicago, working again for a publishing and advertising company. In 1914, he divorced Lane and married Tennessee Mitchell.

Novelist

Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916, followed, three years later, by his second major work, Marching Men. However, he is most famous for the collection of interrelated short stories, which were published in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. He claimed that "Hands", the opening story, was the first "real" story he ever wrote. Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt the need to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White, which was rather successful.

In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, the themes of which he would carry over into much of his later writing. The novel had its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, considered Many Marriages to be Anderson's finest novel.

Beginning in 1924, Anderson lived in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B St. Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in New Orleans. There, he and his wife entertained William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson and other literary luminaries. Of Faulkner, in fact, he wrote his ambiguous and moving short story "A Meeting South," and, in 1925, wrote Dark Laughter, a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience. Although the book is now out of print (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring), it was Anderson's only bestseller.

Another remarriage

Anderson's third marriage also failed, and he married Eleanor Copenhaver in the late 1920s. They traveled and often studied together. In the 1930s, Anderson published Death in the Woods, Puzzled America (a book of essays), and Kit Brandon, which was published in 1936.

Anderson dedicated his 1932 novel, Beyond Desire, to Copenhaver. Although he was much less influential in this final writing period, many of his more significant lines of prose were present in these works, which were generally considered sub-par compared to his other works.

"Beyond Desire", set during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, NC, resulted in yet another satirical mention by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway included a minor character in his 1937 novel To Have and Have Not who is an author. This character is working on a novel of Gastonia.

Death

Anderson died in Panama at the age of 64 while on a cruise to South America. An autopsy revealed that he had accidentally swallowed a toothpick (presumably in a martini olive), which had perforated his colon and caused a fatal case of peritonitis. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure."

Anderson's final home, known as Ripshin, still stands in Troutdale, Virginia, and may be toured by appointment.

Works

Novels

• Windy McPherson's Son (1916)
• Marching Men (1917)
• Poor White (1920)
• Many Marriages (1923)
• Dark Laughter (1925)
• Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926, semi-autobiographical novel)
• Alice and the Lost Novel (1929)
• Beyond Desire (1932)
• Kit Brandon: A Portrait (1936)

Short Story Collections

• Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
• The Triumph of the Egg (1921)
• Horses and Men (1923)
• Hands and Other Stories (1925)
• Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933)

Poetry

• Mid-American Chants (1918)
• A New Testament (1927)

Drama

• Plays, Winesburg and Others (1937)

Nonfiction

• A Story Teller's Story (1924, memoir)
• The Modern Writer (1925, essays)
• Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (1926, memoir)
• Hello Towns! (1929, collected newspaper articles)
• Nearer the Grass Roots (1929, essays)
• The American County Fair (1930, essays)
• Perhaps Women (1931, essays)
• Puzzled America (1935, essays)
• A Writer's Conception of Realism (1939, essays)
• Home Town (1940, photographs and commentary)

Published Posthumously

• Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942)
• The Sherwood Anderson Reader, edited by Paul Rosenfeld (1947)
• The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory (1949)
• Letters of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout (1953)
• Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories, edited by Maxwell Geismar (1962)
• Return to Winesburg: Selections From Four Years of Writing for a Country Newspaper, edited by Ray Lewis White (1967)
• The Buck Fever Papers, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor (1971, collected newspaper articles).
• Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, edited by Ray Lewis White (1972)
• The "Writer's Book," edited by Martha Mulroy Curry (1975, unpublished works)
• France and Sherwood Anderson: Paris Notebook, 1921, edited by Michael Fanning (1976)
• Sherwood Anderson: The Writer at His Craft, edited by Jack Salzman, David D. Anderson, and Kichinosuke Ohashi (1979)
• A Teller's Tales, selected and introduced by Frank Gado (1983)
• Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters: 1916–1933, edited by Charles E. Modlin (1984)
• Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finely, 1916–1933, edited by William A. Sutton (1985)
• The Sherwood Anderson Diaries, 1936–1941, edited by Hilbert H. Campbell (1987)
• Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings, edited by Ray Lewis White (1989)
• Sherwood Anderson's Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin (1989)
• Sherwood Anderson's Secret Love Letters, edited by Ray Lewis White (1991)
• Certain Things Last: The Selected Stories of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin (1992)
• Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin (1997)
• The Egg and Other Stories, edited with an introduction by Charles E. Modlin (1998)

Sources

• Cox, Leland H., Jr. (1980), "Sherwood Anderson", American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 4, Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Rideout, Walter B. (2005–2007), Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, vol. 1–2, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press
• Sutton, William Alfred Exit to Elsinore, 1967

External links

• Works by Sherwood Anderson at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Sherwood Anderson at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Sherwood Anderson Biography
• Sherwood Anderson Biography 2
• Sherwood Anderson in the Dial
• Anderson and The Dial environment 1922
• Sherwood Anderson Links
• Winesburg, Ohio hypertext from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• The Triumph of the Egg hypertext from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Winesburg, Ohio at American Literature
• Sherwood Anderson Short Stories
• Oral History Interview with Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson from Oral Histories of the American South
• Sherwood Anderson Papers at The Newberry Library