ANDERSON, Sherwood (Berton)

Nationality: American. Born: Camden, Ohio, 13 September 1876. Education: High school in Clyde, Ohio; Wittenberg Academy, Springfield, Ohio, 1899-1900. Military Service: Served in the U.S. Army in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, 1898-99. Family: Married 1) Cornelia Pratt Lane in 1904 (divorced 1916), two sons and one daughter; 2) Tennessee Claflin Mitchell in 1916 (divorced 1924); 3) Elizabeth Prall in 1924 (separated 1929; divorced 1932); 4) Eleanor Copenhaver in 1933. Career: Worked in a produce warehouse in Chicago, 1896-97; advertising copywriter, Long-Critchfield Company, Chicago, 1900-05; president, United Factories Company, Cleveland, 1906, and Anderson Manufacturing Company, paint manufacturers, Elyria, Ohio, 1907-12; freelance copywriter then full-time writer, Chicago, 1913-20. Visited France and England, 1921; lived in New Orleans, 1923-24; settled on a farm near Marion, Virginia, 1925; publisher, Smyth Country News and Marion Democrat from 1927; traveled extensively in the U.S. in mid-1930's reporting on Depression life. Member: American Academy, 1937. Died: 8 March 1941.

Publications

Collections

Anderson Reader, edited by Paul Rosenfeld. 1947.

The Portable Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory. 1949; revised edition, 1972.

Short Stories, edited by Maxwell Geismar. 1962.

Short Stories

Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life. 1919; edited by John H. Ferres, 1966.

The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems. 1921.

Horses and Men. 1923.

Alice, and The Lost Novel. 1929.

Death in the Woods and Other Stories. 1933.

Certain Things Last: The Selected Short Stories, edited by Charles E. Modlin. 1992.

Novels

Windy McPherson's Son. 1916; revised edition, 1922.

Marching Men. 1917; edited by Ray Lewis White, 1972.

Poor White. 1920.

Many Marriages. 1923; edited by Douglas G. Rogers, 1978.

Dark Laughter. 1925.

Beyond Desire. 1932.

Kit Brandon: A Portrait. 1936.

Plays

Winesburg (produced 1934). In Winesburg and Others, 1937.

Mother (produced?). In Winesburg and Others, 1937.

Winesburg and Others (includes The Triumph of the Egg, dramatized by Raymond O'Neil; Mother, They Married Later). 1937.

Above Suspicion (broadcast 1941). In The Free Company Presents, edited by James Boyd, 1941.

Textiles, in Anderson: The Writer at His Craft, edited by Jack Salzman and others. 1979.

Radio Play:

Above Suspicion, 1941.

Other

Mid-American Chants. 1918.

A Story Teller's Story. 1924; edited by Ray Lewis White, 1968.

The Modern Writer. 1925.

Notebook. 1926.

Tar: A Midwest Childhood. 1926; edited by Ray Lewis White, 1969.

A New Testament. 1927.

Hello Towns! 1929.

Nearer the Grass Roots. 1929.

The American County Fair. 1930.

Perhaps Women. 1931.

No Swank. 1934.

Puzzled America. 1935.

A Writer's Conception of Realism. 1939.

Home Town. 1940.

Memoirs. 1942; edited by Ray Lewis White, 1969.

Letters, edited by Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout. 1953.

Return to Winesburg: Selections from Four Years of Writing for a Country Newspaper, edited by Ray Lewis White. 1967.

The Buck Fever Papers, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor. 1971.

Anderson/Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, edited by Ray Lewis White. 1972.

The Writer's Book, edited by Martha Mulroy Curry. 1975.

France and Anderson: Paris Notebook 1921, edited by Michael Fanning. 1976.

Anderson: The Writer at His Craft, edited by Jack Salzman and others. 1979.

Selected Letters, edited by Charles E. Modlin. 1984.

Letters to Bab: Anderson to Marietta D. Finley 1916-1933, edited by William A. Sutton. 1985.

The Diaries, 1936-41, edited by Hilbert H. Campbell. 1987.

Early Writings, edited by Ray Lewis White. 1989.

Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhauer Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin. 1989.

Secret Love Letters; for Eleanor, a Letter a Day, edited by Ray Lewis White. 1991.

Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson. 1997.

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Bibliography:

Anderson: A Bibliography by Eugene P. Sheehy and Kenneth A. Lohf, 1960; Merrill Checklist of Anderson, 1969, and Anderson: A Reference Guide, 1977, both by Ray Lewis White; Anderson: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography by Douglas G. Rogers, 1976.

Critical Studies:

Anderson: His Life and Work by James Schevill, 1951; Anderson by Irving Howe, 1951; Anderson by Brom Weber, 1964; Anderson by Rex Burbank, 1964; The Achievement of Anderson: Essays in Criticism edited by Ray Lewis White, 1966; Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation by David D. Anderson, 1967; Anderson: Dimensions of His Literary Art, 1976, and Critical Essays on Anderson, 1981, both edited by David D. Anderson; The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Anderson by William A. Sutton, 1972; Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Walter B. Rideout, 1974; Anderson: Centennial Studies edited by Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin, 1976; Anderson by Welford Dunaway Taylor, 1977; Anderson: A Biography by Kim Townsend, 1987; A Storyteller and a City: Anderson's Chicago by Kenny J. William, 1988; New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio edited by John W. Crowly, 1990; A Comparative Study of Sherwood Anderson and Ryunoskue Akutagawa: Their Concepts of the Grotesquerie by Hiromi Tsuchiya, 1996.

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For a decade following the 1919 publication of Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson was one of the most influential American writers. As an experimenter in fiction and member of the avant garde movement, he was much imitated, and for a half century his influence on writers remained strong because of his rejection of established literary forms, his glorification of the artist's life, and his revitalization of the American idiom as a viable stylistic device in fiction. Even now, when only a few Anderson works—Winesburg and half a dozen short stories—are read and when much of his fiction seems old-fashioned to readers reared on postmodernist literature, his legacy is evident. Richard Ford, for example, whose writing career began almost half a century after Anderson's best work was done, terms Anderson the major influence on his work due to his innovative techniques and style.

In his most productive years Anderson published four collections of stories—Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, Death in the Woods and Other Stories—and more were collected in the posthumous The Sherwood Anderson Reader and, later, in Certain Things Last. Though his disciples Faulkner and Hemingway turned against him, they continued to acknowledge their debt, with Faulkner declaring Anderson the father of the authors of the Lost Generation and Mark Twain the grandfather of all of them. That cryptic tribute acknowledges Anderson's use of colloquial American English, which he had learned from oral storytellers, the Southwest humorists, and Mark Twain, who had broken away from the stylized language characteristic of previous major American authors. Anderson renewed that literary declaration of independence by taking the speech of his boyhood and turning it into a lyrical, even incantatory prose, in which simple words and phrases are reiterated and sense impressions are conveyed concretely, a prose also influenced significantly by his reading of Gertrude Stein. Like Whitman, Anderson rejected conventional literary patterns in favor of an organic fiction in which forms and style grow from reality rather than out of proscribed rules, and even his narrators, whether first or third person, speak a flat Midwestern language.

Anderson's themes, emanating from his philosophy of self-reliance and self-knowledge—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were strong influences—are few and simple: to be out of touch with nature, without identity and the ability to love, is merely to exist ("The Egg" and "The Man Who Became a Woman," for example); and people are dehumanized by the Puritan work ethic, materialism, and practicality ("An Ohio Pagan"). His heroes (or non-heroes) are rebels, such as the writer and artists in "For What?" who struggle, usually futilely, against the status quo. To know oneself was, for Anderson, the ultimate accomplishment, but he remained basically pessimistic about people's ability to understand. Story after story concerns good but naive people, such as the father in "The Egg," who vainly seek answers to their dilemmas. Thus, he breaks the pattern of conventional stories in that his works often do not rise to a climax in which the protagonist is blessed with an epiphany; indeed, in most of them the protagonists are left yearning for just such an insight, and whatever knowledge may be granted as a result of their experiences is limited, unenlightening, providing no solace for the lonely person.

Anderson's stories are of several types, notably the study of a grotesque character, a rite of passage episode, or a picaresque tale, with some falling into more than one category. Most are related by first person narrators, whose revelations are understated, deceptively simple because ironic. The title of one of his most famous and often anthologized stories, "I Want to Know Why," would be appropriate for at least half his short stories. In "I'm a Fool," for example, the narrator, who works as a swipe for an owner of racing horses, lies to a young woman he meets at a race, giving a false name and claiming that he is the son of a wealthy horse owner. The story ends with the anguished narrator denouncing himself as a fool and even, perhaps hyperbolically, wishing he were dead. Whatever chance he may have had with the young woman is lost, and he wants to know why.

In Winesburg, Ohio Anderson introduced his theory of the grotesque character, explained in the introductory piece, "The Book of the Grotesque." The protagonist of the piece, an elderly author, reminiscent of Mark Twain, has determined after a long life that humanity's problem is that at some point people became grotesques by claiming one truth to the exclusion of others. All the Winesburg stories, centered around teenaged George Willard, an aspiring writer, deal with such people: the title character in "Mother," who spends years of frugality to save money so that her son can move to the city, money that he never receives; Doctor Parcival, "The Philosopher," who has determined that "everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified"; and Kate Swift, "The Teacher," who, frustrated by suppressed longings, tries in vain to impart to George Willard a passion for life. In "Adventure," a typical Winesburg story, Alice Hindman, a young dry-goods clerk whose lover has abandoned her, spends years saving money in anticipation of his return. One evening, unable to control her suppressed sexuality and growing restlessness, Alice undresses and goes out into the rain to confront an elderly man who is merely confused by the apparition of a naked woman. She crawls back to the safety of her house, trembling with fear for what she has done, confused herself about the meaning of her adventure.

In "Certain Things Last," a story published first in 1992, Anderson expresses concisely his philosophy of writing fiction. The narrator, a writer, believes that "if I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened." Through an insightful experience, he recognizes that the writer's task is to deal with "certain facts" and "certain things"; if he can write "as clearly as I can the adventures of that certain moment," he will have accomplished his purpose. Anderson throughout his career was concerned with getting the reality of human experience on paper in his stories and allowing readers then to draw whatever enlightenment or message they might from the certain details of the narrative.

—W. Kenneth Holditch

See the essays on "Hands" and "I Want to Know Why."