Anderson, Sherwood

Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941), American author, born in Camden, Ohio. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at various jobs until 1898. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war he went to Chicago, where he began to write novels and poetry. His work won praise from Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht.

Anderson's talent was not widely recognized until the publication of the collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which deals with the instinctive, if inarticulate, struggle of ordinary people to assert their individuality in the face of standardization imposed by the machine age. Noted for his poetic realism, psychological insight, and sense of the tragic, Anderson helped also to establish a simple, consciously naive short-story style. Among his other works are several novels, short stories, and essays. His autobiographies are Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) and Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942).