Sherwood Anderson

(1876-1941)
•
•
 Life experience
• Born into a poor family in southern Ohio, the third of seven children
in a family
• The family was forced to move shortly after Sherwood was born
because his father's small business had failed.
• They finally settled permanently in Clyde, Ohio in 1884.
• Due to the financial difficulties, Anderson's father began drinking
heavily.
• When he was 12 years old, he began to take on odd jobs.
• He finally left high school before graduating.
• He worked as a manual laborer until enrolling in the army for service
in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
• When he returned to the states, he completed his
high school education.
• This led to a new job in Chicago as an copywriter
and solicitor.
• During this time, he wrote and published
numerous essays on a variety of topics, ranging
from business to literature.
• In the following years, he married, had three
children, and became a successful businessman.
• 36, Anderson stopped his work, left his office and never
returned.
• He is quoted as writing, "I was a business man and got sick
of it, and went into writing, not to make a success, but to
give myself an interest in life"
• He divorced and remarried for four times.
• On March 8, 1941, on his way to a goodwill tour of South
America, Anderson died. He had swallowed a bit of a
toothpick at a farewell party, which then penetrating his
intestines, causing the peritonitis that killed him.
 His Literary Career
• The literary output of Sherwood Anderson is
abundant.
• He published eight novels, four collections of
short stories, three books of poems and plays,
more than 300 articles, reviews and essays, and
three volumes of autobiography.
• Upon his death in 1941 he left behind "eleven
hundred manuscripts, including unpublished
fiction and journals, and over 12,000 letters
written to and by most of the artistic and
intellectual leaders of the twentieth century"
• Sherwood Anderson left behind a
substantial amount of work, including short
fiction, novels, plays, essays, and memoirs.
He is best known for his work Winesburg,
Ohio (1919), a collection of stories about
characters in a fictional small town.
Winesburg, Ohio
Anderson and Ohio
•
 Winesburg, Ohio
A group of related short stories rather than a novel.
Individual tales are connected in a loose but
coherent structure.
is a collection of isolated stories but, rather, short
story cycles; that is, collections of stories with
common themes, imagery, and tone, and often
with common setting and characters
Narrator: naïve and young reporter for the local
newspaper, George Willard.
Portrays a series of grotesques
.
• Many of the tales were based on a life Anderson
had witnessed in Clyde, Ohio, the town where he
spent most of his childhood and adolescent years.
• The impressions he gained from the town life and
character of Clyde explains why he gave the book
the subtitle, "A Group of Tales of Ohio Small
Town Life."
• Malcolm Cowley describes this work as
"...a work of love, an attempt to break down
the walls that divide one person from
another, and also, in its own fashion, a
celebration of small-town life in the lost
days of good will and innocence" (15).
 Main Characters
• Lower class figures from small town
• Unsuccessful, depraved, lonely people
 What caused them to become grotesques?

• America passed from a rural to a predominantly industrial

society. The social transition had been a painful experience
in small towns.

The coming of the machine industry put lots of craftsman out of

business, took away their pride and joy in achievement.
The blind belief of materialism mingled with a feeling of doubt
and fear among the small town residents.
Industrialization dehumanized the men and women and made
them grotesques and unable to communicate and love.
• Clinging to some conventional beliefs and living
by their own truth, they were frustrated by their
unfulfillment of their passions and dreams
• They became very lonely and eventually, they are
turned into grotesques by their inability to express
their ideas to others and by misunderstanding
between lovers, friends, mother and son and so on.
• then the sense of alienation, loneliness, and want of love
and understanding turned people into grotesques.
• Winesburg as a microcosm of the
universal: The figures of Winesburg were
forced to handle issues and events which
people universally underwent. Many common
threads between man and between the self in
relation to the world exist which the grotesque
figures deal with in a manner to which any
reader could relate. Winesburg then becomes
Any Town, USA and the characters symbolize
flaws and struggles in the universal human
experience. Winesburg functions synecdochally
for the typical human community.
 theme
Expose the damages by industrialization to
inhabitants of Middle Western small towns
• They are twisted spiritually.
• .
 style
• He paid less attention to the plots and more to the
characters.
• begin nowhere and ended nowhere ）
• “ 未详其始不知所终”
• direct authorial address to the reader; a circular,
not linear, narrative structure; plot subordinated to
characterization; simple style and vocabulary; and
images drawn from elemental aspects of nature.
• "depict the underbelly of American life, reflecting
the private terrors and yearnings beneath the
wholesome veneer of life in Middle America" (1).
In addition to creating his own eccentric
characters, Anderson also had a style all his own.
He did not have the formal training or education
typical of most respected writers of the time;
indeed he used everyday words in simple
sentences as his trademark. In his memoirs,
Anderson explains his word choice: "There was
the language of the streets, of American towns and
cities, of the factories and warehouses where I had