Sherwood Anderson Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life
Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, into a working-class family that moved frequently across small Midwestern towns. His father, a sometime harness maker and house painter, struggled with steady work, and his mother, Emma, held the household together during lean years. The rhythm of itinerant labor, local gossip, and the constriction of small-town life that Anderson absorbed as a boy became the psychic landscape of his mature fiction. Among his siblings, his brother Karl Anderson became a painter of note, and their divergent paths into the arts reflected the family tendency toward restless creativity. Andersons formal schooling was irregular, but he read voraciously, took odd jobs from a young age, and developed habits of observation that would inform his spare, psychologically probing prose.

Work, Service, and the Turn to Writing
As a young man he worked as a newsboy, laborer, and eventually a salesman and copywriter, learning the cadences of American persuasion in the new world of advertising. He served briefly in the Spanish-American War, an experience that sharpened his sense of social hierarchy and the rhetoric of patriotism, though it left fewer direct marks on his later fiction than the Midwest towns he never stopped anatomizing. Afterward he returned to business life and, by the first decade of the twentieth century, had become a capable advertising man and factory manager in Ohio. He married Cornelia Lane in 1904; they would have three children, John, Robert, and Marion. Outwardly successful, he felt increasingly split between commercial obligations and a compulsion to write.

The 1912 Break and Reinvention
On a November day in 1912, after months of stress, Anderson famously walked away from his office in Elyria, Ohio. The episode has been mythologized as a nervous collapse and rebirth; whatever the clinical description, he left the managerial path and moved to Chicago to start over as a writer. In Chicago he found a circle of editors, artists, and radicals associated with the citys burgeoning literary renaissance. He befriended Carl Sandburg and Floyd Dell, debated craft and politics in salons and cafes, and felt the encouragement of established figures such as Theodore Dreiser, who recognized the authenticity of his Midwestern subjects. These relationships anchored his new life and gave him the confidence to pursue fiction with sustained seriousness.

First Publications and a New Voice
Andersons early novels, Windy McPhersons Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917), announced a writer preoccupied with American ambition and the cost of industrial regimentation. He also published poems and sketches, testing forms that could carry the inner vibrations of ordinary lives. During these years he divorced Cornelia Lane, and in 1916 he married Tennessee Mitchell, a sculptor and gallery owner whose modernist circle broadened his acquaintance with contemporary art; the marriage, intense and short-lived, ended in divorce in 1922. The restless years honed a style that rejected ornate plotting for moments of revelation, voiced in plain, rhythmic sentences attentive to loneliness and longing.

Winesburg, Ohio and the American Grotesque
His breakthrough came with Winesburg, Ohio (1919), published by B. W. Huebsch. Organized as linked stories around the young reporter George Willard, the book offered portraits of small-town characters who, in their thwarted desires and obsessive fixations, became what Anderson called grotesques. The work influenced a generation with its elliptical structure, empathetic gaze, and reliance on spoken idioms. Writers as different as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway learned from its compression and its insistence that the inner lives of obscure people mattered. The books success gave Anderson a national platform and a model he would return to in later collections such as The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Death in the Woods (1933).

Experiment, Controversy, and Self-Examination
Through the 1920s, Anderson alternated between novels and stories. Poor White (1920) traced the collision of invention and class in an industrializing Midwest. Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925) tested freer sexual and psychological themes in a prose that tried to capture spontaneity; their experiments divided critics and drew both praise and ridicule. He responded to the storms around his work with striking self-scrutiny in A Story Tellers Story (1924) and later in Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), candid autobiographical books that reconstructed the roots of his voice in family memory and town talk. In 1924 he married Elizabeth Prall, a bookseller connected to New Yorks literary world, a partnership that brought him into closer contact with publishers and critics even as their union would eventually end in divorce in 1932.

Mentor and Friend in the Modernist Generation
Andersons generosity to younger writers became a defining feature of his career. In Chicago he encouraged the young Ernest Hemingway and later provided him letters of introduction to Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein in Paris, facilitating Hemingways entry into transatlantic modernism. Their friendship soured when Hemingway published The Torrents of Spring (1926), a satire aimed in part at Andersons style, but the episode underscored Andersons visibility and influence. He also aided William Faulkner, writing to publisher Horace Liveright on Faulkners behalf; Faulkner dedicated his first novel, Soldiers Pay, to Anderson in gratitude. Thomas Wolfe and others admired Andersons uncompromising focus on the psychic costs of American striving, even when they took different formal paths. In the broader Chicago circle, colleagues such as Sandburg, Dell, and Margaret Anderson (editor of The Little Review) formed a network that gave his work a public stage and critical context.

Life in Virginia, Partnership, and Public Engagement
After years of travel and lecture tours, Anderson settled for long stretches in southwestern Virginia. In 1933 he married Eleanor Copenhaver, a labor organizer with the YWCAs Industrial Division. Their marriage proved his most companionable, rooted in shared curiosity about work and community. Traveling through mill towns and coal camps across the South, he learned from Eleanors investigations into womens labor and industrial conditions. The journeys informed Puzzled America (1935), his collection of Depression-era essays that recorded voices of hardship and resilience with the same sympathetic ear he had brought to Winesburg. He also invested in local journalism, purchasing newspapers in Marion, Virginia, and using their pages to comment on regional issues, culture, and the grind of everyday life. The small-town editor role suited the writer who had always listened first.

Art, Craft, and Method
Andersons method emphasized discovery over design. He sought, in simple sentences and unadorned diction, the revealing moment when a characters protective fictions fall away. His notion of the grotesque did not ridicule; it named the contortions people assume to survive disappointment. Where contemporaries like Dreiser relied on social panoramas and Hemingway on restraint and irony, Anderson turned to confession, monologue, and parable. He urged younger writers to trust their own speech rhythms and the vernacular of their places. The intimacy and vulnerability of his voice, sustained over decades, came from the confidence that the local, treated honestly, can gesture to the universal.

Final Years and Death
Anderson remained active as a columnist, lecturer, and story writer into the late 1930s, buoyed by Eleanors companionship and his ties to Virginia. In early 1941, while traveling to South America with Eleanor, he fell ill and died on March 8 in Colon, Panama. The cause was peritonitis resulting from a swallowed toothpick that perforated his intestines, an accidental end that became part of his legend. He was buried in Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia, the town whose hills and streets resembled the settings he had long transformed into American myth.

Legacy
Sherwood Andersons reputation rests on his transformation of the American short story, his frank mapping of small-town psychology, and his mentorship within a pivotal literary generation. By embracing the broken cadence of remembered talk and the inward drama of ordinary people, he opened space for later writers to find their own local truths. The lives entwined with his own tell much of the story: Cornelia Lane and their children anchoring his early adulthood; Tennessee Mitchell and Elizabeth Prall linking him to modernist art and publishing; Eleanor Copenhaver widening his social vision; and fellow writers such as Dreiser, Sandburg, Faulkner, and Hemingway marking, in friendship and quarrel alike, the reach of his influence. From Camden and Winesburg to Marion and beyond, he left an enduring map of American longing that still guides readers toward the quiet, decisive moments by which lives are made.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Sherwood, under the main topics: Truth - Faith - Soulmate - Horse.