Who was Sherwood Anderson?
One of those unlucky writers who fit perfectly into literary history, Anderson represented the culmination of several trends in American bookery. The 19th century– particularly it’s last few decades, and leading into the years before World War One– as beset by an incredibly strict code of morality. American literature particularly suffered. All literary critics were expected to gauge books on the strength of their moral uprightness and little else. If a woman was “fallen,” she had to be really fallen. If a character gambled or was intemperate, a bolt of lightning from heaven was in order. All our best writers from the early twentieth century rebelled against this trend fiercely. Three movements sprang up in tandem– American naturalism, the revolt against the small town, and the revolt against strict sexual mores. People like Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton were all considered naturalists or realists at one time or another. All were trying to represent life as it was a
Have you ever written a story about your hometown? Maybe you think it’s too “boring” to write about. If so, take a look at American writer Sherwood Anderson. Born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, he is best known for his short stories that reflect his small-town, Midwestern past. Described as “brooding Midwest tales,” they reveal “their author’s sympathetic insight into the thwarted lives of ordinary people.” This third child of a harness maker and sometime house painter had a fondness for storytelling. As a young man, Anderson was intent on establishing his financial independence. He married, had three children and worked, with growing dissatisfaction, in the corporate world until 1909, when he suffered a brief nervous breakdown. He began to write fiction that year while working as a copywriter at a Chicago advertising agency. In Chicago, he met other thriving writers such as Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser, who formed a sort of Chicago literary renaissance. Many of them, li
