Sherwood Anderson 18761941

1
Sherwood Anderson(1876-1941)

• "The young man's mind was carried away by his
  growing passion for dreams. One looking at him
  would not have thought him particularly sharp.
  With the recollection of little things occupying
  his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in
  the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time
  and when he aroused himself and again looked out
  of the car window the town of Winesburg had
  disappeared and his life there had become but a
  background on which to paint his dreams of his
  manhood."
• (from Winesburg, Ohio)

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Winesburg, Ohio http//www.bartleby.com/156/
This collection of short stories allows us to
enter the alternately complex, lonely, joyful,
and strange lives of the inhabitants of the small
town of Winesburg, Ohio.
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Lifehttp//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/shanders.htm

• Writer whose prose style, derived from everyday
  speech, influenced American short story writing
  between World Wars I and II.
• Anderson made his name as a leading naturalistic
  writer with his masterwork, WINESBURG, OHIO
  (1919), a picture of life in a typical small
  Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its
  inhabitants.

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Lifehttp//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/shanders.htm

• Anderson's episodic bildungsroman has been
  compared often to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River
  Anthology. cf http//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/emasters
  .htm
• Bildungsroman (German, from Bildung education
  Roman novel.) A novel dealing with one person's
  formative years or spiritual education.

5
Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)

• Life all around me here in the village Tragedy,
  comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy,
  heroism, failure - All in the loom, and oh what
  patterns!
• 'Petit, the Poet,' from Spoon River Anthology

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Sherwood Anderson Early Life

• Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio.
• His parents led a transient life, moving from one
  place to another after work.
• His father had served in the Union Army and
  declined from the saddlery-and-harness business
  into odd jobs of house- and sign-painting.
• Anderson attended school only intermittently,
  while helping to support his family by working as
  a newsboy, housepainter, stock handler, and
  stable groom.
• At the age of 17 he moved to Chicago where he
  worked as a warehouse laborer and attended
  business classes at night.
• During the Spanish-American war Anderson fought
  in Cuba and returned after the war to Ohio, for a
  final year of schooling at Wittenberg College,
  Springfield.

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Career/Chicago Group

• For the next few years Anderson moved restlessly
  around Ohio.
• His life calmed down for some time with marriage
  and with work as a paint manufacturer.
• After suffering an emotional crisis - more or
  less orchestrated by Anderson himself - because
  of the conflicting demands of his family,
  business and creative life, he left his wife,
  'bourgeois lifestyle', and moved to Chicago.
• There he took again a job in advertising and
  joined the so-called Chicago Group, which
  included such writers as Theodore Dreiser and
  Carl Sandburg.

8
WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON (1916), MARCHING MEN
(1917), and Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

• Anderson's two first novels both containing the
  psychological themes of inner lives of Midwestern
  villages, the pursuit of success and
  disillusionment.
• His third novel, Winesburg, Ohio, was "half
  individual tales, half long novel form", as the
  author himself described it.

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WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON (1916), MARCHING MEN
(1917), and Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

• It consisted of twenty-three thematically related
  sketches and stories. (Episodic sketches)
• Written in a simple, realistic language
  illuminated by a muted lyricism, Anderson
  dramatized crucial episodes in the lives of his
  characters.
• The narrative is united by the appearance of
  George Willard, a young reporter, who is in
  revolt against the narrowness of the small-town
  life and who acts as a counterpoint to the other
  people of the town.

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WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON (1916), MARCHING MEN
(1917), and Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

• The individual tales of Winesburg, Ohio, and
  Anderson's other collections of short stories,
  THE TRIUMPHS OF THE EGG (1921), HORSES AND MEN
  (1932), and DEATH IN THE WOODS (1933), directed
  the American short story away from the neatly
  plotted tales of O. Henry and his imitators.
• The stories in these books are characterized by a
  casual development, complexity of motivation, and
  an interest in psychological process.

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The First Dial Award

• In 1921 Anderson received the first Dial Award
  for his contribution to American literature.
• He travelled widely in Europe - in Paris he met
  Gertrude Stein, whose work he much admired.
• "She is an American woman of the old sort, one
  who cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns
  the factory-made foods, and in her own great
  kitchen she is making something with her
  materials, something sweet to the tongue and
  fragrant to the nostrils."

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Back to the States

• After he returned back to the United States, he
  settled in New Orleans, where he shared an
  apartment with William Faulkner.
• He wrote, among others, the novel DARK LAUGHTER
  (1925), which became a bestseller.
• In the story the disillusioned protagonist
  travels down the Missisippi imagining the kind of
  book Mark Twain might now write.

13
New York - Europe

• From New Orleans Anderson moved to New York for
  some time, and from there finally to Marion,
  Virginia, where he built a country house, and
  worked as a farmer and journalist.
• He travelled again in Europe and wrote to his son
  John, a young painter "I've a notion that, in
  America, you will be less bothered with
  homosexuality inclined men. However the arts have
  always been a refuge for such men. They are, as I
  think you have guessed, the less vigorous men.
  There is some distinct challenge of life they do
  not want to meet, and can't meet."

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Newspaper pieces

• In 1927 he bought both of Marion's weekly
  newspapers, one Republican, one Democrat, and
  edited them for two years.
• To earn extra income he continued his series of
  lectures throughout the country.
• Commissioned by Today magazine, Anderson studied
  the labor conditions during the Depression and
  collected his articles in PUZZLED AMERICA (1935).
  
• Anderson's newspaper pieces were collected in
  HELLO TOWNS (1929), RETURN TO WINESBURG (1967)
  and THE BUCK FEVER PAPERS (1971).

15
Later life

• Anderson's best works influenced almost every
  important American writer of the next generation.
  
• He also encouraged William Faulkner and Ernest
  Hemingway in their writing aspirations.
• Anderson died of peritonitis on an unofficial
  good-will tour to South America, at Christobal,
  Canal Zone, on March 8, in 1941.
• After his death, Anderson's reputation soon
  declined, but in the 1970s, scholars and critics
  have found a new interest in his work.

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autobiographical

• During his lifetime Anderson wrote two
  autobiographical works, A STORY-TELLER'S STORY
  (1924) and semifictional TAR A MIDWEST CHILDHOOD
  (1926).
• His MEMOIRS (1942) and LETTERS (1953) were
  published posthumously, as the more definitive
  THE MEMOIRS OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1969).

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Autobiography vs. fiction

• In A Story-Teller Story the author explained why
  he disregarded dates in his autobiographies "I
  think it was Joseph Conrad who said that a writer
  only began to live after he began to write. It
  pleased me to think I was after all but ten years
  old. Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to
  look about, plenty of time to look about."

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Andersons Influence

• He wrote many tales depicting small-town life in
  the Midwest and had his first great success with
  Winesburg, Ohio (1916), an important work of
  experimental fiction set in a small-town
  environment.
• Anderson wrote simple, direct sentences,
  transferred his point-of-view to outside
  observers, and portrayed a slice of life rather
  than the large panorama of an epic tale many
  subsequent writers, such as Hemingway and
  Faulkner, were influenced by his style.

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Winesburg, Ohio

• http//sz.fl.hfu.edu.tw/hbchang/AM/Shared20Docume
  nts/Winesburg_Ohio_by_Sherwood_Anderson.pdf

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• http//andersonproject.winesburg.com/
• http//andersonproject.winesburg.com/hisworks.htm
  
• The Sherwood Anderson Review http//oncampus.rich
  mond.edu/academics/journalism/01summer.html