Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, a small town near Dayton, on September 13, 1876; he was the third of seven children of Emma and Irvin Anderson. His mother was of Italian descent. His father was a sign painter who was far from being an economic success but who had been a cavalryman in the Union army during the Civil War, where his training as a harness maker was particularly valuable. Gradually the local, independent saddlery was superseded by the harness factories, and craftsmen such as Irvin Anderson became redundant and impoverished. Emma Anderson took in laundry to supplement the family income. The social and economic circumstances of his parents clearly influenced Sherwood’s later thinking and his choice of themes for his stories. In 1884, the Anderson family moved from Camden to Clyde, Ohio, near the Lake Erie city of Cleveland, which is frequently mentioned in Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

For a time after 1896, Anderson worked in a Chicago warehouse before enlisting for service in the Spanish-American War, from which he was discharged with the rank of corporal. Thereafter, he enrolled in Wittenburg Academy at Springfield, Ohio, and graduated in June, 1900, becoming an advertising salesman and copywriter in Chicago. In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane, the first of the four wives whom, as he said, he tried “blunderingly to love.” During those years he became a professional success, writing what he called “rather senseless advertisements,” but he was spiritually unsatisfied. Accordingly, he moved to Elyria, a small town on the periphery of Cleveland, and in 1906 founded the Anderson Manufacturing Company, which produced paint.

For a dozen years Anderson was rather successful economically, and he took satisfaction in his family; however, his success was not wholly fulfilling, and he engaged in extramarital affairs, overindulged in alcohol, and started writing a novel. One day he left his office, was found walking the streets of Cleveland, and was hospitalized for a mental breakdown. Upon his release he returned to Chicago to join the band of writers (including Ben Hecht, Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, and Carl Sandburg) who were the leading spirits within the Chicago Renaissance.

Anderson showed the novel on which he had been working before his breakdown to his new acquaintances in Chicago. They recommended it for publication, and Windy McPherson’s Son (1916), largely autobiographical, offered many indications of the nature of Anderson’s subsequent writing, though it cannot be regarded as a major work of fiction. The character Windy McPherson is a thinly veiled portrait of Anderson’s father; his son, Sam, gropes with the loneliness and oppressiveness of a small town (Caxton, Iowa) and tries to kill his father. He goes to Chicago, becomes successful, and marries advantageously—only to renounce the world of business and financial security in an endeavor to “find truth.” In many ways the early episode imitates Huckleberry Finn’s supposed killing of his father, Pap, which impels Huck’s Mississippi River odyssey in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but the rest of the story, with its exploration of loneliness and aspiration, success and withdrawal, previews the very essence of Winesburg, Ohio.

In the same year, 1916, Anderson divorced Lane and married Tennessee Mitchell. Then, in 1917, he published Marching Men, a novel set in the central Pennsylvania coal mining region that highlighted the failure of a movement to organize the miners against the oppressiveness of cheerless, stultifying routine. In Mid-American Chants (1918), Anderson attempted his hand at poetry but with slight success. His models were Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, and the verse of Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Gertrude...