Death in the Woods | Author Biography

Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio. In his early years, his large family moved frequently and struggled with poverty. When Anderson was eight, the family settled in Clyde, Ohio, the small town that became the model for his famous book Winesburg, Ohio and the setting for many of his other writings. From a young age, Anderson was an ambitious, responsible, and enterprising fellow.

At the age of nineteen, Anderson left Clyde for Chicago, where he worked as a laborer and fell in love with the city. For the rest of his life, he would always be torn between the excitement of life in the big city and the charms of small-town life.

Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson

Anderson served in the Army during the Spanish- American War and then studied at Wittenberg Academy for a year before returning to Chicago to work as an advertising copywriter. After twelve years and much success in the advertising field, he married and started his own business in the town of Elyria, Ohio.

It was during these years in Elyria that Anderson first began to write. With his business and marriage failing, he had a nervous breakdown in 1912. Two years later, he got divorced and moved back to Chicago to begin his career as a fiction writer.

In Chicago he fell in with an influential circle of writers, such as Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Burton Rascoe, and Robert Morss Lovett. He wrote his first novel and began the stories that were to be published as Winesburg, Ohio in 1919.

With Winesburg, Ohio Anderson was recognized as one of the most important American writers of his generation. He soon made his first trip to Europe and met literary luminaries such as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Anderson also became an instrumental mentor for younger modernist writers William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway who were soon to eclipse him in stature.

Anderson never matched the triumph of Winesburg, Ohio. He continued to publish prolifi- cally, but seldom with great success. In the 1920s Anderson bought two newspapers and became involved in labor politics, championing the proletarian cause. He died in 1941 during a trip to South America.