Anderson, Sherwood (1876–1941), born in Ohio, at the age of 14 began his restless career, drifting from job to job and serving in the Spanish‐American War. For a time he settled in his native state, was married, and became the manager of a paint factory; but he suddenly walked out of the factory, left his family, and made his way to Chicago. There, while writing advertising copy, he met such authors as Carl Sandburg and Floyd Dell, who encouraged him to publish his first book,
Windy McPherson's Son (1916), a novel dealing with a boy's life in a drab Iowa town, his rise to success as a manufacturer, and his renunciation of this life to “find truth.” This was followed by another novel,
Marching Men (1917), set in the Pennsylvania coal region and showing the failure of a mystical movement to organize the workers in order to free them from oppressive routine. He also published a book of poems,
Mid‐American Chants (1918), but it was not until 1919, when
Winesburg, Ohio appeared, that he first attracted wide attention. These stories of small‐town people voice the philosophy of life expressed in all his later works. Adopting a naturalistic interpretation of American life, he believed that the primal forces of human behavior are instinctive and not to be denied, as he supposed they are, by the standardization of a machine age. His characters are puzzled, groping, baffled, and possess no vision of order or channel for directing their energies against the frustrations of contemporary existence. Primarily through sex, which he endowed with a mystical significance, Anderson conceived man as having an opportunity to escape from the confinement of this regulated life. Similarly, he placed stress on the mystical identification of man with the primal forces of nature. In
Poor White (1920), a novel of the Midwest, “the town was really the hero of the book…. What happened to the town was, I thought, more important than what happened to the people of the town.” What happens is that the machine comes to the town, destroying whatever beauty and significance it once possessed. The same themes and attitude of mind are evinced in subsequent books:
The Triumph of the Egg (1921), stories and poems depicting frustration and maladjustment in typical American backgrounds;
Horses and Men (1923), stories mainly about horse racing; and
Many Marriages (1923), a novel about a businessman's attempt to escape routine. In
Dark Laughter (1925), a novel contrasting the laughter and song of unrepressed blacks with the spiritual sterility of the whites, he reached artistic maturity both in his style—simple, direct, consciously naïve, and admittedly indebted to Gertrude Stein—and in his mastery of form.
Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) is a fictional treatment of his own life, which he had begun to describe in
A Story Teller's Story (1924). After issuing two volumes of sketches,
The Modern Writer (1925) and
Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (1926), and a volume of poetry,
A New Testament (1927), he retired to a small Virginia town to edit two newspapers, one Republican and the other Democratic. His next book,
Hello Towns! (1929), is a narrative of visits to small towns, and
Nearer the Grass Roots (1929) sets forth his reasons for retirement, to be “in close and constant touch with every phase of life in an American community every day of the year.”
Perhaps Women (1931) is a critical work, placing hope for salvation from the sterility of mechanized life in the leadership of women.
Beyond Desire (1932), his first novel in seven years, shows a shift of scene to the industrialized South, but is still concerned with the problem of modern frustrations. A book of stories,
Death in the Woods (1933), and a survey of the U.S. during the Depression,
Puzzled America (1935), were followed by another novel,
Kit Brandon (1936), showing the author's characters still trapped in a situation with which they cannot cope.
Home Town (1940) is a collection of essays.
Memoirs (1942) and
Letters (1953) were posthumously issued, as was
Letters to Bab (1985), correspondence with his mistress, and
Love Letters to Eleanor … (1989), communications with his fourth wife (1929–41).
