Sherwood Anderson
1876-1941
Nationality: American
Year of Birth: 1876
Place of Birth: Camden, OH
Year of Death: 1941
Place of Death: Cristobal (one source says Colon), Panama Canal Zone
Genre(s): Short Stories, Novels, Travel/Exploration, Poetry, Essays, Autobiography/Memoir, Writing/Journalism
Table of Contents:
· Personal Information
· Career
· Writings
· Sidelights
· Further Readings About the Author
Personal Information: Family: Born September 13, 1876, in Camden, OH; died of peritonitis, March 8, 1941, in Cristobal (one source says Colon), Panama Canal Zone; son of Irwin M. (a harnessmaker) and Emma (Smith) Anderson; married Cornelia Lane, 1904 (divorced, 1916); married Tennessee Mitchell, 1916 (divorced, 1924); married Elizabeth Prall, 1924 (divorced, 1932); married Eleanor Copenhaver, 1933; children: two sons, one daughter. Education: Attended Wittenberg Academy, 1899.
Education: Entry Updated : 10/09/2003
Career: Writer. Worked as copywriter for advertising firm in Chicago, 1900; president of United Factories Co., in Cleveland, OH, 1906, and of Anderson Manufacturing Co., in Elyria, OH, 1907-12; advertising copywriter in Chicago, 1913; editor of two newspapers in Marion, VA, 1927-29; lecturer. Military service: U.S. Army, 1899; served in Cuba.
Award(s):
Prize from Dial, 1921.
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
· Windy McPherson's Son (novel), John Lane, 1916, revised edition, B. W. Huebsch, 1922, reprinted, University of Illinois Press, 1993.
· Marching Men (novel), John Lane, 1917, reprinted as Marching Men: A Critical Text, edited by Ray Lewis White, Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972.
· Mid-American Chants (poems), John Lane, 1918, reprinted, Frontier Press, 1972.
· Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life (also see below), B. W. Huebsch, 1919, New American Library, 1956, reprinted with introduction by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1960, reprinted as Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism, edited by John G. Ferres, Viking, 1966, reprinted as Winesburg, Ohio: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism edited by Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White, Norton, 1996; Winesburg, Ohio, edited with an introduction by Glen A. Love, Oxford University Press, 1997; Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: With Variant Readings and Annotations, edited by Ray Lewis White, Ohio University Press (Athens), 1997.
· Poor White (novel), B. W. Huebsch, 1920, reprint, New Directions Publishing, 1993.
· The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions From American Life in Tales and Poems, B. W. Huebsch, 1921, new edition with an introduction by Herbert Gold, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988.
· Many Marriages (novel), B. W. Huebsch, 1923, reprinted as Many Marriages: A Critical Edition, edited by Douglas G. Rogers, Scarecrow, 1978.
· Horses and Men: Tales, Long and Short, B. W. Huebsch, 1923.
· A Story-Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey through His Own Imaginative World and through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions among Other Writers--Told in Many Notes--in Four Books and an Epilogue, B. W. Huebsch, 1924, reprinted as A Story Teller's Story: A Critical Text, edited by White, Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968, revised edition with preface by Rideout, Viking, 1969, recent edition published as A Story-Teller's Story, Penguin, 1989.
· Dark Laughter (novel), Boni Liveright, 1925, reprinted with introduction by Howard Mumford Jones, Liveright, 1925.
· Hands and Other Stories (selections from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life), Haldeman-Julius, 1925.
· The Modern Writer (nonfiction), Lantern Press, 1925, reprinted, Folcroft, 1976.
· Sherwood Anderson's Notebook: Containing Articles Written During the Author's Life as a Story Teller, and Notes of His Impressions from Life Scattered through the Book, Boni Liveright, 1926, reprinted, P. P. Appel, 1970.
· Tar: A Midwest Childhood (semi-autobiography), Boni & Liveright, 1926, reprinted as Tar: A Midwest Childhood; A Critical Text, edited by White, Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969.
· A New Testament (prose poems), Boni Liveright, 1927.
· Alice [and] The Lost Novel, E. Mathews Marrot, 1929, reprinted, Folcroft, 1973.
· Hello Towns! (collection of newspaper articles), Liveright, 1929, reprinted, Dynamic Learning, 1980.
· Nearer the Grass Roots [and] An Account of a Journey, Elizabethton (essays), Westgate Press, 1929, reprinted, Folcroft, 1976.
· Perhaps Women (essays), Liveright, 1931, reprinted, P. P. Appel, 1970.
· Beyond Desire (novel), Liveright, 1932, reprinted with introduction by Rideout, Liveright, 1961.
· Death in the Woods, and Other Stories, Liveright, 1933, recent edition, 1986.
· No Swank (articles), Centaur Press, 1934, reprinted, Appel, 1970.
· Puzzled America (articles), Scribner, 1935.
· Kit Brandon (novel), Scribner, 1936.
· Plays: Winesburg and Others (includes Jaspar Deeter, a Dedication, Winesburg, The Triumph of the Egg, Mother, and They Married Later), Scribner, 1937.
· Home Town (nonfiction), Alliance Book Corp., 1940, reprinted, P. P. Appel, 1975.
· Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, Harcourt, 1942, reprinted as Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs: A Critical Edition, edited by White, University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
· The Sherwood Anderson Reader, edited by Paul Rosenfeld, Houghton, 1947.
· The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory, Viking, 1949, Penguin, 1970.
· Letters of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Rideout and Jones, Little, Brown, 1953.
· The Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Maxwell Geismar, Hill Wang, 1962.
· Return to Winesburg: Selections from Four Years of Writing for a Country Newspaper, edited by White, University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
· Buck Fever Papers (articles), edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor, University Press of Virginia, 1971.
· A Teller's Tales, selected and introduced by Frank Gado, Union College Press, 1983.
· Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters, edited by Charles E. Modlin, University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
· Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finely, 1916-1933, edited by William A. Sutton, University of Illinois Press, 1985.
· The Sherwood Anderson Diaries, 1936-1941, edited by Hilbert H. Campbell, University of Georgia Press, 1987.
· Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings, edited by Ray Lewis White, Kent State University Press, 1989.
· Sherwood Anderson's Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin, University of Georgia Press, 1989.
· Sherwood Anderson's Secret Love Letters, edited by Ray Lewis White, Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
· Certain Things Last: The Selected Stories of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Modlin, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992.
· Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin, University of Georgia Press (Athens), 1997.
· The Egg and Other Stories, edited with an introduction by Charles E. Modlin, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1998.
Work represented in anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including Dial.
"Sidelights"
While Sherwood Anderson did his best creative work in prose fiction, he created not only a distinctive, repetitive persona in his stories but also a public role. Giving impetus both to his fiction and to his life was a profound autobiographical need expressed in the lyrical nature of his fiction and in the creation of the public myth as well as in three major autobiographical works A Story-Teller's Story, Tar: A Midwest Childhood, and his Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs. Anderson's contributions to twentieth-century American letters are both defined and circumscribed by this need to express his intense personal vision.
Anderson's critical reputation has been a subject of much debate. However, in at least three areas his literary impact has been considerable. First, he was very active in helping other writers. For example, writer Ernest Hemingway carried Anderson's letter of introduction with him to writer Gertrude Stein's influential salon in Paris, and clearly such stories as Hemingway's "My Old Man" suggest how Hemingway found inspiration in Anderson's racetrack stories. More candid in acknowledging Anderson's influence was Nobel laureate writer William Faulkner, who in 1950 recalled how Anderson helped him publish his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), and provided an attractive example of a writer's lifestyle when they spent time together in the New Orleans French Quarter. In a statement made before he quarreled with Anderson, writer Thomas Wolfe declared that Anderson was the only man in America who taught him anything; the pervasiveness of the "aloneness" theme in the fictions of both writers is apparent to even the most casual reader. While these instances suggest Anderson's roles in the careers of our foremost novelists, they are but a few of the many instances of how, in literally thousands of letters, lectures, and essays, Anderson promoted the craft.
Another, more elusive aspect of Anderson's influence is found in the development of the short story form. Many studies of modern story theory and short story anthologies allude to his technique in and his pronouncements about fictive form. While Anderson's statements about his art do not add up to a clear, conscious sense of design, they are consistent and can be characterized as "expressive"--focusing on the writer in his art of creation, not on the fidelity of his imitation or the response of the audience. His notion of form is central to his aesthetics; and form for him was subjective and organic.
Such an approach to artistic form can be more vulnerable to failure than is an aesthetic that is self-conscious and dependent on willed techniques. Certainly Anderson experienced many periods when form did not come--or came imperfectly--while he seemed powerless to change the imperfections.
Two important ramifications of his aesthetic stance are his views of plot and characterization. He bitterly attacked the stories of O. Henry and others for their "poison plots"--stories that sacrificed characterization and fidelity to life for the sake of striking turns of event. In an almost perverse way, Anderson expected a writer to have utter loyalty to the characters in his imagination. His typical stories, then--both unique and typically modern in eschewing strict plots--offered a compelling model for other writers.
Most importantly, Anderson was the creator of some of the finest American stories. Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his masterpiece, remains a durable classic, and half a dozen or more individual stories, such as "The Egg," "I Want to Know Why," "The Man Who Became a Woman," and "Death in the Woods," are among the finest products of the American short story tradition. Winesburg, Ohio is a hybrid form, unified by setting, theme, and character; but clearly the stories are also discreet and are further evidence that Anderson's genius lay in the short form. He wrote seven novels, but most critics agree that not one is completely satisfactory. Some of Anderson's most acclaimed writing appears in the mixed genres such as A Story-Teller's Story (1924) and his Memoirs (1942), but his lasting achievement is in his short fiction.
Because of the nature of Anderson's art, as outlined above, some survey of his life is of more than usual concern in assessing his literary achievement. The outline is familiar to most Anderson scholars: early boyhood in Ohio, mainly Clyde, Ohio; his "conventional" period when he became a businessman, husband to a better-educated, more sophisticated woman, and when he became father of three children; the break from commercial life into the greatest period of his artistic development and achievement--the decade after 1912; most of the 1920's when, despite a few exceptions and interludes of professional contentment, he struggled to maintain the level of earlier achievement; and a final period until his death in 1941, when from a base in southwestern Virginia, his writing turned increasingly toward social commentary, and he appeared to reach a state of relative equanimity, content in his fourth marriage and in the role as elder statesman in the writing community.
The richest lode of material for Anderson's best fiction was comprised of his experiences growing up in the Ohio small towns. While many of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio were based on people he met in an apartment house in Chicago, the fictional Winesburg is essentially Clyde, Ohio, in the 1890s. Critic Walter Rideout has shown how fully Anderson evokes the Clyde setting. Like the book's protagonist, George Willard, Anderson left his hometown after his mother's death in 1895 broke up the family, and both were budding writers. Furthermore, Tom and Elizabeth Willard are important creations in a long series of veiled portraits of and responses to Anderson's own parents. The trajectory of his coming to terms with his father's life can be traced from his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son (1916), through Winesburg, Ohio to a kind of acceptance in A Story-Teller's Story. His deepest feelings about his mother impel the characterizations of many of his women; but especially noteworthy are Elizabeth Willard, who figures so prominently in Winesburg, and, in a kind of apotheosis, the old woman in "Death in the Woods," one of his finest stories.
Anderson, like George Willard, was perhaps an incipient artist when he left his hometown, but the creative fires were banked while he pursued the American dream of business success. After short tenures as a Chicago laborer, as a soldier in the Spanish-American War, and as a student at Wittenberg Academy, he began working for a Chicago advertising firm in sales and copywriting. He did similar work in Cleveland, Ohio, and Elyria, Ohio; but despite his apparent success and growing family responsibilities--children born in 1917, 1908, and 1911--Anderson had begun to write fiction and to feel the warring claims of artistic creation and business values. Finally Anderson left the Anderson Manufacturing Company in November, 1912, as he said, in the middle of dictating a letter. He was found a few days later in a Cleveland hospital and did return briefly to the business world, but that day proved to be the great watershed of his career. When Anderson wrote of the urban settings, the business world, and businessmen in his fiction, it was usually to satirize corrupting materialism.
It was fortuitous that the Chicago to which Anderson returned provided an exciting milieu for writers--the so-called Chicago Renaissance. He met and was encouraged by such men and women as Floyd Dell, Margery Currey, Margaret Anderson, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Burton Rascoe, Lewis Galantiere, Harry Hansen, Ferdinand Schevill, and Robert Morss Lovett. He heard discourses on socialism, on the pioneering psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, and on writers such as Fedor Dostoevsky, August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. And he began playing the bohemian role not only in appearance, but also in his second, "modern" marriage to Tennessee Mitchell. More importantly, he sounded the thematic notes of his writing career and discovered the distinctive voice of his best writing.