Sherwood Anderson is described as a man who, despite trying a variety of jobs, marriages, and locales, was dogged by a sense of living an unfulfilled life. Do the unfulfilled characters in his fiction generally have such an awareness? Or do theydiffer from their author in this respect?

What does Anderson gain from using a newspaper reporter as his narrator in Winesburg, Ohio?

Anderson calls his Winesburg characters “grotesques.” Are his grotesques ever likable? Are they ever beautiful?

Each of Anderson’s characters is said to achieve an epiphany, “a special insight or revelation.” What evidence do you see that these epiphanies actually do the characters any good?

Do you see any instances of Anderson’s style being less simple than it seems to be?

Sherwood Anderson published seven novels, collections of essays, memoirs, poetry, and dramatizations of Winesburg, Ohio, as well as other stories. He was a prolific article writer and for a time owned and edited both the Republican and Democratic newspapers in Marion, Virginia. In 1921, he received a two-thousand-dollar literary prize from The Dial magazine. While employed as a copywriter, Anderson wrote many successful advertisements.

Sherwood Anderson, a protomodernist, is generally accepted as an innovator in the field of the short story despite having produced only one masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio. In his work, he not only revolutionized the structure of short fiction by resisting the literary slickness of the contrived plot but also encouraged a simple and direct prose style, one which reflects the spare poetry of ordinary American speech. Anderson’s thematic concerns were also innovative. He was one of the first writers to dramatize the artistic repudiation of the business world and to give the craft of the short story a decided push toward presenting a slice of life as a significant moment. His concern with the “grotesques” in society—the neurotics and eccentrics—is also innovative as is the straightforward attention he pays to his characters’ sexuality. Anderson’s contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck were influenced by his work, as were several later writers: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver.

In addition to Winesburg, Ohio, which some critics regard as a collection of loosely related short stories, Sherwood Anderson produced three volumes of short stories: The Triumph of the Egg (1921); Horses and Men (1923); and Death in the Woods, and Other Stories(1933). He published two books of prose poems, Mid-American Chants (1918) and A New Testament (1927). Plays: Winesburg and Others was published in 1937. Anderson’s autobiographical writings, among his most interesting prose works, include A Story Teller’s Story (1924), Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), and the posthumously published Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs (1942). All three are such a mixture of fact and fiction that they are sometimes listed as fiction rather than autobiography. Anderson also brought out in book form several volumes of journalistic pieces, many of which had appeared originally in his newspapers: Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook (1926), Perhaps Women (1931), No Swank (1934), Puzzled America (1935), and Home Town (1940). The Modern Writer (1925) is a collection of lectures.

Sherwood Anderson was not a greatly gifted novelist; in fact, it might be argued that he was not by nature a novelist at all. He was a brilliant and original writer of tales. His early reputation, which brought him the homage of writers such as James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, was established by the stories published in Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, and Horses and Men. Anderson had published two novels before Winesburg, Ohio and was to publish five more, but none of these achieved the critical success of his short pieces.

Anderson’s difficulties with the novel are understandable when one sees that his great gift was for rendering moments of intense consciousness—“epiphanies,” as James Joyce called them—for which the short story or the tale is the perfect vehicle. The novel form requires a more objective sense of a world outside the individual consciousness as well as the ability to move characters through change and development and to deal to some extent with the effect of character on character. The best parts of Anderson’s novels are those scenes in which he deals, as in the short stories, with a minor character trapped by his own eccentric nature in a hostile world.

Another serious limitation to Anderson’s talent as a novelist was his inclination to preach, to see himself as a prophet and reformer and to make sweeping generalizations that are as embarrassing as they are inartistic. Even in Poor White, probably his best novel, his characters run to types and become, finally, representative figures in a social allegory. In his worst novels, the characters are caricatures whose absurdity is not perceived by their author. Anderson’s style, which could at times work brilliantly, became excessively mannered, a kind of self-parody, which was a sure sign that he had lost his grip on the talent that had produced his best and earlier work.

Winesburg, Ohio is without doubt Anderson’s great achievement. It is a collection of tales striving to become a novel; indeed, most critics regard it as a novel, a new form of the novel, which, though perhaps first suggested by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), took on its own expressive form and became the model for later works such as Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924) and William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938). A few of the Winesburg stories, such as “Godliness,” are marred by a tendency to generalization, but on the whole they assume the coherence and solidity of such masterpieces as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which bristle with implications not only about the life of their times but also about the present. If Anderson had published only Winesburg, Ohio, he would be remembered and ranked as an important minor American novelist.