Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Berton Anderson (1876–1941) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose loosely connected story cycle Winesburg, Ohio made him a pivotal influence on the next generation of American fiction, including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe. He was born in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven children in a poor family that moved several times before settling in Clyde, Ohio, the small town that would supply much of the material for his Winesburg sketches.

He left school at fourteen, served briefly in the Spanish-American War, and worked in advertising in Chicago and as the manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. In 1912 he walked out of his Elyria office in what later became a famous breakdown and moved permanently to Chicago, where he joined the writers and editors of the Chicago Renaissance grouped around Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, and Margaret Anderson's Little Review.

His first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, appeared in 1916, but his standing rests on Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a book of twenty-two interlinked stories about repressed lives in a fictional Midwestern town, and on later collections such as The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men (1923). His novels Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925) were also widely read in their day.

From 1927 he edited two small Virginia newspapers in Marion. He died in Colón, Panama, in 1941 of peritonitis caused by an accidentally swallowed toothpick.

Sherwood is an English place-name surname from Old English scir-wudu, shire-wood, used as a masculine given name; he carried the masculine form.