From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sherwood Anderson
Anderson in 1933
Born	September 13, 1876(1876-09-13) Camden, Ohio, United States
Died	March 8, 1941 (aged 64) Panama
Occupation	Author
Notable work(s)	Winesburg, Ohio
Influenced Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Ray Bradbury

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.^[1] Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Amos Oz, among others.^[2]

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 wandering around in nearby cornfields. Soon after, he left his position as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and three small children^[3] 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 1916, he divorced Lane and married Tennessee Mitchell.

Novelist

Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916. Three years later, his second major work, Marching Men, was published. However, he is most famous for his collection of interrelated short stories, which he began writing in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. He claimed that Hands, the opening story, was the first "real" story he ever wrote. His themes are comparable to those of T. S. Eliot and other modernist writers

Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt the need to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White, a rather successful novel. He wrote various novels before divorcing Mitchell in 1922 and marrying Elizabeth Prall, two years later.

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 and Circle Of Death to be Anderson's finest novels.

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 best-seller.

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. The cause of death was peritonitis after he accidentally swallowed a piece of a toothpick embedded in a martini olive at a party.^[4] 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

• Windy McPherson's Son, (1916, novel)
• Marching Men, (1917, novel)
• Winesburg, Ohio, (1919, novel)
• Poor White, (1920, novel)
• Triumph of the Egg, (1921, short stories)
• Many Marriages, (1923, novel)
• Horses and Men, (1923, short stories)
• A Story-Teller's Story, (1924, semi-autobiographical novel)
• Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, (1924, memoirs)
• An Exhibition of Paintings By Alfred H. Maurer, (1924, non-fiction)
• Dark Laughter, (1925, novel)
• A Meeting South, (1925, novel)
• Modern Writer, (1925, non-fiction)
• Tar: A Midwest Childhood, (1926, semi-autobiographical novel)
• Sherwood Anderson's Notebook, (1926, memoirs)
• Hello Towns, (1929, non-fiction)
• Alice: The Lost Novel, (1929, novel)
• Onto Being Published, (1930, non-fiction)
• Beyond Desire, (1932, novel)
• Death in the Woods, (1933, short stories)
• Puzzled America, (1935, essays)
• Kit Brandon, (1936, novel)
• Dreiser: A Biography, (1936, non-fiction)
• Winesburg and Others, (1937, play)
• Home Town, (1940, novel)
• San Francisco at Christmas, (1940, memoirs)
• Lives of Animals, (1966, novel)
• Return to Winesburg, Ohio, (1967, essays)
• The Memoirs of Sherwood Anderson, (1968, memoirs)
• No Swank, (1970, novel)
• Perhaps Women, (1970, novel)
• The Buck Fever Papers, (1971, essays)
• Ten Short Plays, (1972, plays)
• Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, (1972, essays)
• Nearer the Grass Roots, (1976, novel)
• The Writer at His Craft, (1978, non-fiction)
• Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the Arts, (1978, nonfiction)
• The Teller's Tale, (1982, novel)
• Selected Letters: 1916 – 1933, (1984, letters)
• Writer's Diary: 1936–1941, (1987, memoir)
• Early Writings of Sherwood Anderson, (1989, short stories)
• Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, (1990, letters)
• The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, (1995, short stories)
• Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings By Sherwood Anderson, (1998, short stories)

References

• Cox, Leland H., Jr. (1980), "Sherwood Anderson", American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 4, Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co. 
• Rideout, Walter B. (2005–2007), Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, 1-2, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 

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

From Wikiquote

Sherwood Anderson (1876-09-13 – 1941-03-08) was an American writer, mainly of short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio.

Sourced

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

• In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
  • "The Book of the Grotesque"

• On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
  • "Paper Pills"

• Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
  • "The Philosopher"

• "You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."
  • "The Teacher"

• "Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses."
  • "Death"

• 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 the dreams of his manhood.
  • "Departure"

The Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories (1921)

• 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 right.
  • "I Want to Know Why"

Unsourced

• Realism in so far as it means reality to life is always bad art.

• My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Sherwood Anderson

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Sherwood Anderson

• Sherwood Anderson at Project Gutenberg