Anderson, Sherwood

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ANDERSON, SHERWOOD

A business man turned writer, Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876–March 8 1941) was called by H. L. Mencken, "America's most distinctive novelist." Anderson grew up in a series of Ohio towns, the second of seven children of an unsuccessful harness maker and itinerant house painter and a long-suffering mother. His spotty education ended when at age twenty-three he graduated from Wittenberg Academy. He sought his fortune in advertising and then the mail-order business, and found it with an Ohio company that manufactured roof repair materials. By 1907 he was its president.

In fiction that he wrote at night, Anderson sought to transcend the world in which he worked by day. The worlds clashed in 1912 when he walked out of his office in a fugue state and wandered for days, ending up in a Cleveland hospital, not knowing who he was. When he recovered he dedicated his life to writing. His midlife crisis became legendary. Anderson was heralded as proof that America was growing out of its infatuation with material prosperity.

Anderson wrote seven novels, several autobiographies and plays, and innumerable prose pieces. He was at his best in his four volumes of short stories, the most famous of which is Winesburg, Ohio (1919). In the late 1920s he bought and edited two rival weeklies in southwestern Virginia.

It was there that he met Eleanor Copenhaver, a social worker in the Industrial Division of the

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YWCA. He accompanied her in her travels to textile and steel mills, union halls, and workers' homes throughout the South. In 1933, Eleanor joined him in a happy marriage (his fourth) that lasted until his death. Although drawn to radical causes and meetings, he was too much the artist to toe any party line; instead he wrote about workers' conditions and the governmental and company policies that improved or worsened them. In Perhaps Women (1931) Anderson glossed his accounts of the dislocations southern workers were experiencing with the theory that men were being emasculated by their machines and needed to turn to women for their salvation. In Puzzled America (1935) he was content to let those workers, the unemployed, preachers, and the down-and-out speak for themselves. He discovered no prospect of revolution, no danger of fascism, but instead "a hunger for belief," a determination to find and follow the leadership "we are likely to get out of democracy." The result, according to Irving Howe, was "one of the few books that convey a sense of what it meant to live in depression America." In the years that followed, he wrote Kit Brandon (1936), a novel about a female bootlegger, and several plays. He died en route to South America, where he had hoped to learn and write about communal life in a version of his famous Winesburg.

See Also: LITERATURE.