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Sherwood Anderson

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sherwood Anderson
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(born Sept. 13, 1876, Camden, Ohio, U.S. — died March 8, 1941, Colon, Pan.) U.S. author. Anderson was irregularly schooled. Having married, he abruptly left his family and business career to become a writer in Chicago. Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of interrelated sketches and tales about the obscure lives of the citizens of a small town, was his first mature book and made his reputation. His short stories were collected in The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933). His prose style, based on everyday speech and influenced by the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, in turn influenced such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

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Biography: Sherwood Anderson
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The works of the American writer Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) are graced by a psychological complexity absent from earlier American fiction. His stories stress character and mood, and his style is laconic and colloquial.

Sherwood Anderson was born on Sept. 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven children. His father was an easygoing, improvident man whose itinerant habits resulted in spotty educations for his children. Sherwood had no formal education after the age of 14, although he did attend Wittenberg College for a short time.

Anderson had a belated writing career. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, then began a successful business career in advertising. But it was while owning and managing a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, that he began, about 1908, to write stories and novels.

The turning point in Anderson's life came in 1912, when, suffering from nervous exhaustion and amnesia, he suddenly deserted his factory. The next year, with his brother Karl, a well-known painter, he went to Chicago and fell in with the "Chicago group" - Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and others - through whose efforts his earliest work was published. Windy McPherson's Son (1916), his first novel, uses his father as the prototype for Windy, a drifter and teller of tall tales.

A second novel, Marching Men (1917), and a collection of prose poems, American Chants (1918), followed. Then Anderson published his masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a series of fictionalized sketches of "grotesques," his term for people defeated by false dreams, people whose illusions have left them vulnerable to profound hurts from which they never recover. Perhaps the best sketch is "Hands," the story of Wing Biddlebaum, a mournful eccentric who recounts his traumatic experience: he was once a loving small-town schoolteacher, but narrow-minded townspeople, acting on nothing more than a child's agitated and false report, branded Wing as a sexual deviant, drove him from the town, and almost lynched him.

The unity of Winesburg, Ohio, established by the presence of a perceptive observer (George Willard, a young reporter) and by the pervasive theme of human frustration, has led some critics to regard the book as a novel, a view taken by Anderson himself. Regardless of its genre, it is a significant expression of a theme associated with D.H. Lawrence - the psychological damage wrought by an industrial civilization - rendered with extraordinary compassion.

Despite his late start, Anderson was a prolific writer. Poor White (1920), a novel, was followed by The Triumph of the Egg (1921), a collection of stories, the most notable of which is "The Egg," a haunting symbolist tale of a man who has violated his nature by accommodating himself to his wife's ambitions. Many Marriages (1923), a novel, was followed by Horses and Men (1923), a collection of stories which includes "I'm a Fool," a superb, sympathetic treatment of the theme of American bravado.

Anderson's biggest money-maker, however, was the relatively weak novel Dark Laughter (1925), which attempts to measure the white man's crippling anxiety against the black man's tuneful laughter but succeeds only in contributing albeit unwittingly, to racial stereotypes.

Anderson was a heavyset Midwesterner with a leonine head and masses of wavy hair. He was comfortable only in casual clothes. An eccentric man, he once, in the 1920s, bought and edited two rival weekly newspapers in Marion, Va., one Democratic and one Republican. He was married four times; he had two sons and one daughter by his first wife.

Having deserted Ohio for Chicago, he traveled extensively in Europe. Although he continued to write until his death, his later work received scant attention. He died of peritonitis at Colon, Panama, on March 8, 1941.

Further Reading

For a long while the chief obstacle to an understanding of Anderson's life was his own notoriously unreliable autobiographical writings: A Story-Teller's Story (1924), Notebook (1926), and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926); the posthumously published Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942) was reedited by Ray Lewis White in 1969. Probably the best studies of Anderson and his work are lrving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (1951), and James Schevill, Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work (1951). More recent are Ray Lewis White, ed., The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson: Essays in Criticism (1966), and David D. Anderson, Sherwood Anderson (1967).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sherwood Anderson
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Anderson, Sherwood, 1876-1941, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Camden, Ohio. After serving briefly in the Spanish-American War, he became a successful advertising man and later a manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. Dissatisfied with his life, however, Anderson abandoned both his job and his family and went to Chicago to become a writer. His first novel, Windy McPherson's Son (1916), concerning a boy's life in Iowa, was followed by Marching Men (1917), a chronicle about the plight of the working man in an industrial society. In his best-known work, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a closely integrated collection of stories, he explores the loneliness and frustration of small-town lives. This work contains perhaps the most successful expression of the theme that dominates all Anderson's works-the conflict between organized industrial society and the subconscious instincts of the individual. In his later novels-Poor White (1920), Many Marriages (1923), and Dark Laughter (1925)-he continues to explore, but generally with less skill, the spiritual and emotional sterility of a success-oriented machine age. Anderson's unique talent, however, found its best expression in his short stories. Such collections as The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933) contain some of his most compassionate and penetrating writing. In 1927, Anderson moved to Marion, Va., where he bought and edited two newspapers, one Republican and one Democratic.

Bibliography

See his autobiographical Story Teller's Story (1924) and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926); memoirs (1942); letters (ed. by H. M. Jones and W. B. Rideout, 1953); diaries (ed. by H. H. Campbell, 1987); biographies by I. Howe (1966) and K. Townsend (1987); studies by P. P. Appel, ed. (1970) and W. D. Taylor, ed. (1977).

Works: Works by Sherwood Anderson
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(1876-1941)

1916Windy McPherson's Son. Anderson's autobiographical first novel concerns life in a small Iowa town and a youth's departure to Chicago to make his fortune. The novel sounds many of Anderson's characteristic themes: the mixed nature of small-town American life, the warping power of material success, and the challenge of male-female relationships.
1917Marching Men. Anderson's second novel is an unfocused, poetic meditation on social improvement, set in the Pennsylvania coal-mining country, where an idealist attempts to organize the miners.
1918Mid-American Chants. Anderson's collection of rough-hewn verses reflects the author's contention that "I do not believe that we people of midwestern America, immersed as we are in affairs, hurried and harried through life by the terrible engine-- industrialism--have come to the time of song."
1919Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson's landmark short story collection provides glimpses of frustrated small-town American life from the perspective of the central consciousness of young reporter George Willard. The stories are linked by their common setting and by Anderson's concept of "grotesques," characters warped by their environment and inwardly divided. The collection's realism, intensity, and criticism of ordinary American life are harbingers of the direction that American fiction would subsequently follow.
1920Poor White. This story of an Ohio town going through the transition from agriculture to industrialization is regarded by most critics as Anderson's greatest achievement as a novelist.
1921The Triumph of the Egg. Subtitled "A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems," Anderson's glimpses of ordinary life emphasize futility, thwarted instincts, and repressed emotions. The volume includes some of his best stories, such as "The Egg" and "I Want to Know Why."
1923Horses and Men and Many Marriages. The first is a collection of short and longer stories, mainly about horseracing. The second is a novel about a respectable businessman who breaks out of a deadened, conventional lifestyle.
1924A Story Teller's Story. Anderson begins a fictionalized autobiography, which he would continue in Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) and conclude with Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942).
1925Dark Laughter. Juxtaposing the sterility of white civilization with the unrepressed lives of blacks, the novel follows a Chicago reporter as he travels the Mississippi and returns to his Indiana hometown. It becomes the only commercial success among Anderson's novels but fails to restore his critical reputation and would inspire Ernest Hemingway's parody, The Torrents of Spring (1926). Hemingway later apologized for the attack, stating, "I thought he was going to pot the way he was writing and that I could kid him out of it by showing him how awful it was."
1929Hello Towns! and Nearer the Grass Roots. The first is a celebration of small-town American life; the second justifies Anderson's retirement to a small Virginia town to become a newspaper editor.
1931Perhaps Women. The writer's curious amalgam of poetry, narrative, and opinion mounts an attack on modern life and posits that perhaps the solution to modern problems will come when women are in charge.
1932Beyond Desire. In his first novel in seven years, Anderson shifts his setting from the Midwest to a Southern mill town but continues his exploration of a youth's search for meaning and fulfillment and a community's dislocation due to industrial change.
1933Death in the Woods and Other Stories. Arguably Anderson's strongest collection, the volume includes the title work, which Anderson considered his best, and the masterful "Brother Death." The bankruptcy of the book's publisher, Liveright, prevents wide distribution, and the volume has never received the attention it deserves.
1935Puzzled America. The writer surveys the state of the nation in a series of sketches of miners, textile workers, and farmers. Irving Howe would observe that the work "is one of the few books that convey a sense of what it meant to live in depression America."
1936Kit Brandon. Anderson's final novel concerns a Virginia mountain girl who struggles as a mill worker, shop girl, and finally a moonshine runner. Written in an attempt to be "more objective," the novel is considered the best constructed of any of Anderson's longer works.
1940Home Town. Anderson publishes a collection of autobiographical essays and portraits in pictures and text of small-town American life. Reviews note a mellowing of the author, and one describes him as a "cheerful Chekhov."
1942Memoirs. One of the author's most impressive achievements is this blend of fact and fiction that traces the stages of his artistic development.

Quotes By: Sherwood Anderson
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Quotes:

"That 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."

Wikipedia: Sherwood Anderson
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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

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, and John Steinbeck, among others.[2]

Contents

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. Family difficulties led Erwin to begin drinking heavily; he died in 1895.

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. 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, short stories)
  • Alice: The Lost Novel, (1929, novel)
  • Onto Being Published, (1930, non-fiction)
  • Beyond Desire, (1932, novel)
  • Death in the Woods, (1933, essays)
  • 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

  1. ^ Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941)
  2. ^ anderbio.html
  3. ^ http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/sherwood-anderson/ About Sherwood Anderson
  4. ^ Sherwood Anderson: A writer in America, p. 401
  • 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 

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