Sherwood Anderson

Titles in Fiction category:

• Marching Men

  Uncle Charlie Wheeler stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor's bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a wink at the Reve ...

• Out of Nowhere into Nothing.

  Rosalind Wescott, a tall strong looking woman of twenty-seven, was walking on the railroad track near the town of Willow Springs, Iowa. It was about four in the afternoon of a day in August, and the third day since she had come home to her native town from Chicago, where she was employed. ...

• Poor White

  Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back from the ...

• Winesburg, Ohio    

  by Irving Howe

Titles in Short Stories category:

• Brothers

  I am at my house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back of my house is a forest and in front there is a road and beyond that open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into plains. Some twenty miles away, across the flat country, lies the huge city Ch ...

• Door of the Trap, The

  Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough. She understood that when a man is put behind iron bars he is in prison. Marriage was marriage to her.

• Dumb Man, The

  There is a story.--I cannot tell it.--I have no words. The story is almost forgotten but sometimes I remember.

• Egg, The    

  My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove into town ...

• I Want to Know Why

  We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then we knew we were all rig ...

• Man in the Brown Coat, The    

             Napoleon went down into a battle riding on a horse.
             Alexander went down into a battle riding on a horse.
             General Grant got off a horse and walked in a wood.
             General Hindenburg stood on a hill.
             The moon came up out of a clump of bu

• Motherhood

  Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill.

• New Englander, The    

  Her name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and the soil was not very rich. From the ...

• Other Woman, The

  "I am in love with my wife," he said--a superfluous remark, as I had not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked for ten minutes and then he said it again. I turned to look at him. He began to talk and told me the tale I am now about to set down.

• Seeds

  He was a small man with a beard and was very nervous. I remember how the cords of his neck were drawn taut.

• Senility

  He was an old man and he sat on the steps of the railroad station in a small Kentucky town.

• Unlighted Lamps    

  Mary Cochran went out of the rooms where she lived with her father, Doctor Lester Cochran, at seven o'clock on a Sunday evening. It was June of the year nineteen hundred and eight and Mary was eighteen years old. She walked along Tremont to Main Street and across the railroad tracks to Up ...

• War    

  The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who belonged with her--a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down in the aisle ...

About the Author

Writer whose prose style, derived from everyday speech, influenced American short story writing between World Wars I and II. Anderson made his name as a leading naturalistic writer with his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a picture of life in a typical small Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. Anderson's episodic bildungsroman has been compared often to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.

"The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint his dreams of his manhood." (from Winesburg, Ohio)

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio. His parents led a transient life, moving from one place to another after work. His father had served in the Union Army and declined from the saddlery-and-harness business into odd jobs of house- and sign-painting. Anderson attended school only intermittently, while helping to support his family by working as a newsboy, housepainter, stock handler, and stable groom. At the age of 17 he moved to Chicago where he worked as a warehouse laborer and attended business classes at night. During the Spanish-American war Anderson fought in Cuba and returned after the war to Ohio, for a final year of schooling at Wittenberg College, Springfield.

For the next few years Anderson moved restlessly around Ohio. His life calmed down for some time with marriage and with work as a paint manufacturer. After suffering an emotional crisis - more or less orchestrated by Anderson himself - because of the conflicting demands of his family, business and creative life, he left his wife, 'bourgeois lifestyle', and moved to Chicago. There he took again a job in advertising and joined the so-called Chicago Group, which included such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg.

Anderson's two first novels were Windy McPherson's Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917), both containing the psychological themes of inner lives of Midwestern villages, the pursuit of success and disillusionment. His third novel, Winesburg, Ohio, was "half individual tales, half long novel form", as the author himself described it. It consisted of twenty-three thematically related sketches and stories. Written in a simple, realistic language illuminated by a muted lyricism, Anderson dramatized crucial episodes in the lives of his characters. The narrative is united by the appearance of George Willard, a young reporter, who is in revolt against the narrowness of the small-town life and who acts as a counterpoint to the other people of the town. The individual tales of Winesburg, Ohio, and Anderson's other collections of short stories, The Triumphs of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1932), and Death in the Woods (1933), directed the American short story away from the neatly plotted tales of O. Henry and his imitators. The stories in these books are characterized by a casual development, complexity of motivation, and an interest in psychological process.

In 1921 Anderson received the first Dial Award for his contribution to American literature. He travelled widely in Europe - in Paris he met Gertrude Stein, whose work he much admired. "She is an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns the factory-made foods, and in her own great kitchen she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils." After he returned back to the United States, he settled in New Orleans, where he shared an apartment with William Faulkner. He wrote, among others, the novel Dark Laughter (1925), which became a bestseller. In the story the disillusioned protagonist travels down the Missisippi imagining the kind of book Mark Twain might now write.

From New Orleans Anderson moved to New York for some time, and from there finally to Marion, Virginia, where he built a country house, and worked as a farmer and journalist. He travelled again in Europe and wrote to his son John, a young painter: "I've a notion that, in America, you will be less bothered with homosexuality inclined men. However the arts have always been a refuge for such men. They are, as I think you have guessed, the less vigorous men. There is some distinct challenge of life they do not want to meet, and can't meet." In 1927 he bought both of Marion's weekly newspapers, one Republican, one Democrat, and edited them for two years. To earn extra income he continued his series of lectures throughout the country. Commissioned by Today magazine, Anderson studied the labor conditions during the Depression and collected his articles in Puzzled America (1935). Anderson's newspaper pieces were collected in Hello Towns (1929), Return to Winesburg (1967) and The Buck Fever Papers (1971).

Anderson's best works influenced almost every important American writer of the next generation. He also encouraged William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway in their writing aspirations. Anderson died of peritonitis on an unofficial good-will tour to South America, at Christobal, Canal Zone, on March 8, in 1941. After his death, Anderson's reputation soon declined, but in the 1970s, scholars and critics have found a new interest in his work. During his lifetime Anderson wrote two autobiographical works, A Story-Teller's Story (1924) and semifictional Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926). His Memoirs (1942) and Letters (1953) were published posthumously, as the more definitive The Memoirs of Sherwood Anderson (1969). In A Story-Teller Story the author explained why he disregarded dates in his autobiographies: "I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to write. It pleased me to think I was after all but ten years old. Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time to look about."

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.