A short life of the author
Sherwood Berton Anderson (1876–1941) was born on 13 September 1876 in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven children. His father was a harness maker and itinerant sign painter whose drinking and storytelling shaped Sherwood’s imagination; his mother, Emma, died when he was eighteen. The family drifted among small Ohio towns — the “Winesburg” of Anderson’s fiction is a composite of these communities.
Life and Career
Anderson left school at fourteen, worked as a labourer, served in the Spanish-American War, and then enrolled at Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio, before launching a career in advertising and business. He married Cornelia Lane in 1904 and became the manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. The pivotal event — legendary in American literary history — occurred on 28 November 1912, when Anderson walked out of his factory in the middle of dictating a letter, disappeared for four days, and was found in Cleveland in a state of confusion. Whether this was a genuine nervous breakdown or a calculated escape from the suffocating respectability of business life has been debated ever since. Either way, it was the break that made him a writer.
Anderson moved to Chicago, where he joined the “Chicago Renaissance” circle that included Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Floyd Dell, and Margaret Anderson (no relation). His first two novels — Windy McPherson’s Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917) — were conventional and forgettable. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was not.
Winesburg, Ohio — a sequence of twenty-two interconnected stories set in a small Ohio town, linked by the figure of George Willard, a young reporter — revolutionised the American short story. The stories strip away the moralising plot conventions of nineteenth-century fiction to reveal the inner lives of ordinary people: their loneliness, their thwarted desires, their desperate attempts to communicate. The prose is plain, rhythmic, and emotionally devastating.
Anderson published further novels and story collections — Poor White (1920), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), Dark Laughter (1925, his only bestseller), Death in the Woods (1933) — but nothing matched Winesburg’s impact. He mentored both Hemingway and Faulkner in the early 1920s; Hemingway repaid the debt with a cruel parody, The Torrents of Spring (1926), that ended their friendship.
Anderson married four times, edited two small-town Virginia newspapers, and died on 8 March 1941 in Colón, Panama, of peritonitis caused by swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party — one of the stranger deaths in American literary history.
Major Works and Themes
Anderson’s great theme is the isolation of the individual in small-town America — the gap between the inner life of feeling and the outward conventions of respectable behaviour. His characters are “grotesques” (his own term): people who have seized upon a single truth and been distorted by it.
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is his masterpiece and one of the most influential American books of the century. Its stories — “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” “Adventure,” “The Untold Lie” — are portraits of loneliness so acute that they achieve a kind of universality. The prose style, with its deliberate simplicity and repetitive rhythms, influenced Hemingway directly and, through Hemingway, the entire tradition of the American short story.
The Hemingway Problem
Anderson’s relationship with Hemingway is one of the most consequential and most painful in American letters. Anderson introduced the young Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and helped him publish In Our Time (1925). Hemingway responded with The Torrents of Spring (1926), a vicious parody of Anderson’s style — particularly the sentimental, pseudo-primitive mannerisms that Anderson’s later work sometimes exhibited. The betrayal was deliberate: Hemingway needed to kill the father figure whose influence he feared, and the parody served that purpose. Yet the irony is that Hemingway’s own prose — the short declarative sentences, the suppression of emotion, the revelation of character through observed behaviour — is unthinkable without Anderson’s example. Hemingway refined and hardened what Anderson had invented; he did not invent it himself.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Anderson was hugely influential in the 1920s — Faulkner called him “the father of my generation of American writers.” His reputation declined sharply after his death, partly because his later work was weak and partly because his protégés outshone him. The reassessment of the last forty years has restored Winesburg, Ohio to its rightful place as one of the essential American books and Anderson as the originator of the modern American short story tradition that runs through Hemingway, Faulkner, Carver, and beyond.
Key Works
- Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
- Poor White (1920)
- The Triumph of the Egg (1921)
- Horses and Men (1923)
- Dark Laughter (1925)
- Death in the Woods (1933)
- A Story Teller’s Story (1924, autobiography)
Collecting Anderson
Sherwood Anderson is a rewarding author to collect, anchored by Winesburg, Ohio, one of the most important American first editions of the twentieth century.
Winesburg, Ohio (1919, B.W. Huebsch, New York) was published in yellow cloth with a paper label on the spine. First editions are identified by the Huebsch imprint and the absence of the Viking colophon (Viking acquired Huebsch in 1925). Fine copies in the original dust jacket are rare — the jacket is fragile and rarely survives — and bring $5,000–$20,000. Without jacket, first editions in good condition bring $500–$2,000.
Windy McPherson’s Son (1916, John Lane, New York), Anderson’s first book, is collected as the debut title; copies in jacket bring $1,000–$4,000.
Poor White (1920, Huebsch) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921, Huebsch) first editions are available at $300–$1,500.
Anderson was a cooperative signer, and signed copies surface regularly. Inscribed copies, particularly those to Hemingway, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, or members of the Chicago Renaissance circle, are prized. Letters are available at $300–$2,000.