Winesburg, Ohio Book by Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio

The Novel “Winesburg, Ohio” is written by Sherwood Anderson. Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three additional times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson’s time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was his only bestseller. Though he was a decent student, Anderson’s attendance at school declined as he began picking up work, and he finally left school for good at age 14 after about nine months of high school. From the time he began to cut school to the time he left town, Anderson worked as a “…newsboy, errand boy, waterboy, cow-driver, stable groom, and perhaps printer’s devil, not to mention assistant to Irwin Anderson, Sign Painter…” in addition to assembling bicycles for the Elmore Manufacturing Company. Even in his teens, Anderson’s talent for selling was evident, a talent he would later draw on in a successful career in advertising. As a newsboy he was said to have convinced a tired farmer in a saloon to buy two copies of the same evening paper. With the exception of work, Anderson’s childhood resembled that of other boys his age. In addition to participating in local events and spending time with his friends, Anderson was a voracious reader. Though there were only a few books in the Anderson home (The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Complete Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson among them), the youth read widely by borrowing from the school library (there was not a public library in Clyde until 1903), and the personal libraries of a school superintendent and John Tichenor, a local artist, who responded to Anderson’s interest.