the world.
Sherwood Anderson
1876-1941Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in southern Ohio, the third of seven children. His father was a harness-maker, and his trade was being rendered obsolete by mass production. An easygoing man, the elder Anderson was given to telling tall tales and to heavy drinking.Sherwood often had to help out at home, his schooling was spotty. His mother died when he was fourteen, his father drifted out and away from the family forever, and Anderson s formal education virtually came to an end. He never completed college and was obliged to work at a number of menial jobs.eventually became an advertising copywriter, and in the spirit of the new century and the new age , he extolled the world of business in his copy. Married and a family man, he bought a paint factory and continued to write copy ennobling the life he had chosen, even though he felt trapped in it. He was, he later said, following an adage often repeated to him: Get money. Money makes the mare go. On November 27, 1912, at the age of thirty-seven, Anderson left the factory muttering, leaving his co-workers with the idea that he had lost his mind.1916, at the age of forty, he produced Windy Mc Pherson s Son, a novel about a man, who, like the author himself, abandons his business in order to find truth. In 1917 appeared Marching Men. But his early writings were only moderately successful.1919, Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, a series of short stories about the people in a small mid-western town. It is now an American classic. But when it first appeared, it was called unclean, filthy , even by Theodore Dreiser, the popular realistic novelist who had helped Anderson bring his first works to the public.the first stories of Sherwood Anderson were published, they were the subjects of heated debate. The structure and focus of this collection of stories were inspired by Edgar Lee Masters s collection of poems called Spoon River Anthology. Anderson was concerned not with well-crafted plots in the traditional sense, but with revealing the secret needs and longings of twenty-two people from one small town. The stories are unified by their characters, by their setting, and by Anderson s theory of the grotesque . According to the introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, a grotesque is someone who seizes a single truth out of life and lives by that truth alone. Tragically, these single-minded pursuits drive the characters into isolation. What made the stories in Winesburg shocking was that Anderson also explored the intimate thoughts of his characters. The result was a series of portraits that were honest, unflinching - and, at the time, painful for many to deal with.there are few dramatic events in the Winesburg stories, many readers dismissed them as non-stories . One member of the Chicago Group felt that the stories were so formless that Anderson should throw them away. The major complaint from readers, however, dealt with the unconventional subject matter, especially with the themes of sexuality and repression. One woman, who had attended a dinner party with Anderson, sent him a letter saying, ... having sat beside you and having read your stories, I feel that I should never be clean again. other famous story books are The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men ( 1923). his criticism of industry and of the American dream that money will bring happiness, Anderson proposed his own dream of love as happiness. He once wrote:
I began to gather these impressions. There was a thing called happiness toward which men were striving. They never got to it. All of life was amazingly accidental. Love, moments of tenderness and despair, came to the poor and the miserable as to the rich and successful. It began to seem to me that what was most wanted by all people was love, understanding. Our writers, our storytellers, in wrapping life up into neat little packages, were only betraying life. s subsequent novels Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925) mark a deterioration of his realistic art. Anderson is more than just a regionalist. He was among the first American authors to become interested in psychological motivation and the unconscious, with the themes of loneliness and alienation constantly recurring. As for himself, Anderson kept escaping
