Sherwood Anderson: The Father American Fiction Tried to Kill
In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner told the world that his generation of American writers were "all of us children of Sherwood Anderson." Ernest Hemingway, by contrast, repaid the man who helped publish his first book by writing a cruel parody of him, *The Torrents of Spring*, and never apologized. Both reactions point to the same fact: Sherwood Anderson, a failed Ohio paint manufacturer who walked out of his office one November afternoon in 1912 and never fully explained why, became the writer the next generation of American novelists had to absorb, imitate, and then publicly outgrow.
A Business Career Built to Collapse
Sherwood Berton Anderson was born September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven children of a harness-maker whose fortunes steadily declined; the family settled in Clyde, Ohio, and young Sherwood, nicknamed "Jobby" for the string of odd jobs he took to help support the household, left school at 14. He served in the Spanish-American War without seeing combat, then built a genuinely successful career in advertising and manufacturing, rising to the presidency of a mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio, that he had built himself under the name "Roof-Fix."
The Breakdown
On November 28, 1912, while dictating a business letter, Anderson murmured something about his feet being wet and walked out of his office. He turned up four days later in a Cleveland drugstore, disoriented and unable to identify himself. Anderson later mythologized the episode in his memoirs as a deliberate escape — "I wanted to leave, get away from business... The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out" — but biographers regard this as a self-serving retelling of what modern psychiatry would likely call a fugue state, not a calculated decision. Whatever its cause, the breakdown ended his business career. He divorced his first wife, Cornelia Lane, with whom he had three children, and moved to Chicago to write full time — at 37, with no literary reputation and no guarantee the decision would work.
Winesburg, Ohio
It worked. After two apprentice novels, Anderson published *Winesburg, Ohio* in 1919, at age 42 — a cycle of interlinked short stories about the isolated, thwarted inner lives of the residents of a fictional small Midwestern town. Anderson called his characters "grotesques," people warped by loneliness into single, dominant obsessions they could never voice or resolve. The book's plain, unornamented prose and its willingness to explore psychological interiority — an early American application of ideas then associated with Freud — struck readers and younger writers as something genuinely new in American fiction. Nearly a century later, critic Michael Dirda would rank *Winesburg, Ohio* second only to *The Great Gatsby* among the most frequently taught works of American literature in university seminars.
Mentor to a Generation
Anderson's greatest influence ran through the writers who read him rather than through his own later books. He personally helped get Ernest Hemingway's first book published and advised a young William Faulkner to go home to Mississippi and write about the place he actually knew — advice that shaped the entire trajectory of Faulkner's career. Anderson and his third wife, Elizabeth Prall, hosted Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, and other writers at their apartment near Jackson Square during a mid-1920s residence in New Orleans, turning their home into an informal proving ground for a new generation's ideas about fiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck were also among his avid readers. The relationship with his two most famous disciples soured, in different ways: Hemingway mocked him savagely in print and never made amends, while Faulkner, decades later and with the distance of his own Nobel Prize, publicly acknowledged the debt in full.
A Long, Uneven Decline
Anderson kept publishing for two more decades — story collections, novels including *Poor White* and *Dark Laughter* (his only bestseller), essays, and memoirs — but none matched *Winesburg*'s impact, and by the time of his death his critical standing had slipped badly; contemporaries increasingly saw him, in the words of one retrospective assessment, as "an anachronism, a cautionary figure" to the writers he had once mentored. He spent his final years at Ripshin, a farm he built in Troutdale, Virginia, running a local newspaper and continuing to write, still preoccupied — across three partly fictionalized memoirs — with the childhood and difficult father that had shaped him. He died unexpectedly on March 8, 1941, in Colón, Panama, during a South American cruise, after peritonitis set in from an accidentally swallowed toothpick. He was 64.
Why Sherwood Is Called a Genius
The case for calling Anderson a genius rests on a fairly narrow but genuine claim: he found, more or less on his own and with almost no formal education past the age of 14, a way to bring psychological interiority and emotional plainness into American short fiction before it was fashionable to do so, and he did it well enough that the writers who went on to define twentieth-century American literature said so themselves — Faulkner's Nobel Prize line calling his own generation "children of Sherwood Anderson" is about as strong an endorsement as literary history offers. That is a real and specific creative insight: seeing, in the frustrated, wordless lives of small-town Ohioans, material for a new kind of American sentence. The honest counter-case is substantial, too. Anderson's prose has always struck careful readers, including his admirer Irving Howe, as vague and technically loose next to the more disciplined stylists he influenced, and his own career after *Winesburg* was a long, largely acknowledged decline; he never wrote another book of comparable stature, and he was, by his own generation's later judgment, more valuable as a catalyst for other people's genius than as a permanently first-rank artist in his own right.
Legacy
Anderson's name survives less as a byword for a body of great books than as the answer to a specific literary-historical question: who taught the writers who taught everyone else? *Winesburg, Ohio* remains a staple of American literature courses, Ripshin Farm is a National Historic Landmark, and the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, established by his descendants in 1988, continues to fund emerging writers in his name — a fitting afterlife for a man whose most durable achievement may have been recognizing talent in others before he had fully arrived at his own.
Achievements
- Notable work: Winesburg, Ohio
- Worked as writer, poet and short story writer
.jpg)
