Sherwood Anderson

Widely regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, Sherwood Anderson was born in the small town of Camden, Ohio in 1876. To help his family of nine make ends meet, Anderson left school at the age of 14 and worked several blue-collar jobs throughout his adolescence, earning the experience he would later utilize to work his way up in the advertising profession. However, after enduring a severe mental breakdown in 1912, likely due to overwork, Anderson chose to abandon his business and pursue his lifelong passion for writing full-time. He was prolific and composed across genres throughout his literary career, publishing short stories, novels, poems, and essays. No doubt shaped by Modernist contemporaries like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is perhaps the best-known of all Anderson’s work. This collection of interconnected stories about a fictional Midwestern town influenced an array of prominent American writers through the years, including William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ray Bradbury. With so much of Anderson’s writing set against the rural Midwestern backdrop he knew so intimately, his version of the Midwest often adopts the role of a character itself, variably representing the plights, desires, fears, and dreams of those living in the region. Anderson passed away in 1941 at the age of 64 and was laid to rest in Marion, Virginia, where his epitaph reads, “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”