Sherwood Anderson grew up in Clyde, Ohio, a small town that became the model for the fictional Winesburg in his best-known book. His father was a harness maker and sign painter whose business declined as the town industrialized. Anderson left school early and worked odd jobs before serving briefly in the Spanish-American War. He returned to Ohio and eventually ran a paint factory in Elyria. In November 1912, he walked out of his office mid-sentence during a dictation and disappeared for four days. He was found disoriented in Cleveland. The episode ended his business career and began his writing life in earnest.
He moved to Chicago and fell in with the literary circle around Floyd Dell and Carl Sandburg. His first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, appeared in 1916. Winesburg, Ohio followed in 1919 as a collection of linked short stories about lonely, frustrated people in a small Midwestern town. The book sold modestly at first but reshaped American short fiction. Its plain, declarative sentences and focus on interior life broke from the plot-driven magazine fiction of the period.
Anderson’s later novels, including Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925), had uneven receptions. Dark Laughter was his only bestseller. He spent his later years in Marion, Virginia, where he edited two local newspapers simultaneously, one Republican and one Democratic. He mentored both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway early in their careers. Hemingway later parodied Anderson’s style in The Torrents of Spring, which strained their friendship.
Anderson died on March 8, 1941, in Colon, Panama, at age 64. He had swallowed a toothpick fragment at a cocktail party, which caused peritonitis.