Sherwood Anderson
American Author of Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg
Early Days
Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876. His father Irwin was a wandering type, known for his travels and tall tales, and because of Irwin’s lackadaisical approach to breadwinning, young Anderson had to take numerous odd jobs to help support his mother and six other siblings. While he later attended college briefly, his high school education ended at age fourteen.
After volunteering for the Spanish American War and returning from service without ever having to fight, Anderson married in 1904 and took a job as a copywriter in Chicago. He was successful at that work and in 1906 left to return to Ohio to manage several paint factories and a mail-order enterprise. Again Anderson proved to be a successful businessman who enjoyed writing advertising literature and trying new marketing strategies. At the same time, however, Anderson was also torn by the desire to find greater meaning in both his own words and his life, a need that would soon become too strong to overcome.
A New Chapter
In November of 1912, Anderson was dictating a letter to his secretary at the paint factory in Elyria, Ohio when he paused and laughed strangely. He told her, “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet.” He then left the office and began walking off into the distance, following the railroad tracks. He was found in Cleveland several days later, exhausted and still completely confused. This is Sherwood Anderson’s often-told account of his breakdown, and in essence, the complete inability to carry on with his life in Elyria was the result of various financial, marital and creative troubles that had been building up for some time.
After a short period of convalescence, Anderson returned to Chicago, working as copywriter again. Although it would be another decade before he would be able to support himself fully as a fiction writer, in Chicago Anderson had begun to find the artistic and intellectual stimulation that would send him on his way. Chicago was enjoying something of a cultural awakening at that time, with Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters making their home in the city. Anderson became part of the salons and parties, and of course he took part in the discussions. It was noted that Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell, a Chicago literary critic and one of Anderson’s earliest fans, would talk on about society and art, politics and writing until everyone else had gone home and they were simply speaking to empty chairs.
Winesburg, Ohio
It was during this time that Anderson began to write the series of stories that would form his Winesburg, Ohio collection. Published in 1919 and clearly based on his early days in Clyde, Ohio, Winesburg offers portraits of the town’s various inhabitants and their secret losses and dreams. Without lapsing into the tone of melodrama or preachy morality popular in fiction at the time, Anderson deftly shows us the small world of Winesburg, both suffocating and comforting to its residents. There are jiltings and seductions, unspoken truths, and twists of fate that just can’t be overcome. Central to many of the stories is the character of George Willard, who represents Anderson as a child and young man. George is encouraged almost fiercely by his teacher, Kate Swift, to become a writer and “know what people are thinking about, not what they say.” The final story, “Departure,” shows George leaving Winesburg for the big city, staring out the train window as the town disappears and becomes merely “a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”
Although he wrote many novels and autobiographical works, Anderson is considered a master of the short story genre. The spareness of his style combined with the power of his observations makes Anderson’s storytelling unique, particularly in the groundbreaking Winesburg, Ohio. A noted influence on Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, we can even see similarities to the more contemporary writer Raymond Carver, with his intense psychological insight into quiet and desperate lives.
Legacy
A curious personality, Anderson was married four times and through the years gave varying accounts of his experiences, perhaps embellishing or perhaps reinventing himself again. In the 1920s, he bought and served as editor for two rival newspapers in Virginia, one Democrat and the other Republican. His death at sixty-four was also peculiar, as a result of peritonitis from apparently having swallowed a toothpick while visiting Panama. Nonetheless, Anderson had left his mark on American literature and come very far since that day in 1912, when he walked away from the office and the unfinished letter in Ohio and took the first real steps toward living and life.
Sources
Sherwood Anderson: Answers.com
Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, Malcolm Cowley (Viking Press, 1960)
Floyd Dell, The Life and Times of An American Rebel, Douglas Clayton (Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 1994)
Sherwood Anderson (Carl Van Vechten, 1933)
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