Anderson, Sherwood

(US, 1876–1941)

Sherwood Anderson included the name of the state where he was born in the title of his most famous and influential book, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). This is a collection of linked short stories, in which the frustrations of life in a small mid-western town are graphically documented in simple, vivid prose that is perfectly suited to the ordinary people with which it deals. The inhabitants of Winesburg are described as ‘grotesques’ because the confines of the town have not allowed them to develop in the way they wanted to, and Anderson is unusually frank for his time in dealing with their sexual problems. He came to writing late and was not particularly accomplished as a novelist, but he produced other fine short stories, some of which are collected in Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933).

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner  RF