Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 March 8, 1941) was an American writer, mainly of short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio. His influence on American fiction was profound; his literary voice can be heard in Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and others.
He was born in Malverne, Ohio, the third of Erwin M. and Emma S. Anderson's seven children. After his father's business failed, they were forced to move frequently, finally settling down at Clyde, Ohio in 1884. Family difficulties led his mother to begin drinking heavily, and his father died in 1895. Partly as a result of these events, Anderson was eager to take on odd jobs to help his family, earning him the nickname "Jobby", leaving school at 14.
He moved to Chicago near his brother Karl's home. He worked as a manual laborer until near the turn of the century, when he enlisted in the United States Army and was called but did not see action in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war in 1900, he attended Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a copywriter job in Chicago, where he was highly successful. In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio family.
He fathered three children while living in Cleveland, Ohio, and later Elyria, where he managed a mail-order business and paint manufacturing firms. In November 1912, he went missing, but reappeared four days later after having a mental breakdown. He described this as "escaping from his materialistic existence", which garnered praise from many other writers, who used his "courage" as an example. He moved back to Chicago, working again for the publishing and advertising company.
In 1914, he divorced Cornelia Lane and married Tennessee Mitchell. That same year, his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published. Three years later, his second major work, Marching Men, was published. However, he is probably most famous for his collection of works, which he began in 1915, known as Winesburg, Ohio. His themes are compared to those of T. S. Eliot and many other such modernists.
Although his short stories, especially those mentioned, were very successful, he felt the need to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White, a rather successful novel. He wrote various novels before divorcing Mitchell in 1922 and marrying Elizabeth Prall, two years later.
In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, the themes of which he would carry over into much of his later writing.
When he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1925 after that he attended Lincoln College at Oxford.
Some of his other works include Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917) which was followed by his pioneering anthology Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926), collaborations with his brother.
He served in WWII as a flight radar observer and navigator. After serving in the army he went to school at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He went there on the G. I. Bill. After graduating from Vanderbilt with a M. A. in English, he started to teach. He taught first at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. His time there was cut short because he was recalled to duty in Korea as flight training instructor. But as soon as he was discharged from the Corps he returned to teach again at Rice University. He taught at Rice until 1954 when he left to go to Europe on the Sewanee Review fellowship. After returning to the U.S. he joined the English Department at the University of Florida. He did not stay there long because he resigned after a dispute after he h...
the academic life so he quit to write full time. Kinsella was married to Mildred Clay from
After Dunbar published Majors and Minors he published Lyrics of a Lowly Life and then left America for a six month reading tour in England. When he returned in 1897, he became a clerk at the library of Congress in Washington D.C. and then published his first collection of short stories entitled Folks From Dixie, in 1898. Later, his first novel, the Uncalled was publis...
After the war, he returned to Tuskegee and completed his degree in Commercial Industries and Tailoring and graduated Cum ...
He was then drafted into the U.S. Army where he was refused admission to the Officer Candidate School. He fought this until he was finally accepted and graduated as a first lieutenant. He was in the Army from 1941 until 1944 and was stationed in Kansas and Fort Hood, Texas. While stationed in Kansas he worked with a boxer named Joe Louis in order to fight unfair treatment towards African-Americans in the military and when training in Fort Hood, Texas he refused to go to the back of the public bus and was court-martialed for insubordination. Because of this he never made it to Europe with his unit and in 1944 he received an honorable discharge.
Later he returned back to the US and decided to run for the Republican nomination for the 1880 election but was defeated by James Garfield. After that he invested most of his money in the bank firm Grant and Ward, that his son and partner owned but Grant did not know that Ward was involved in a fraud which caused all of the firm's money to be lost. After the fraud he lost all of his money and was now broke, so in order to make some money he started writing newspaper articles about what he went through during the civil war. He soon found out that he liked writing and decided to start writing his story, the company to which he was working for offered to publish it but he declined the offer and instead took the offer his friend Mark Twain had given him. While he was writing his book he discovered that he had severe throat cancer from all the years he had spent smoking. He soon lost his voice and only continued to write his story, just days before he died he finished it and it was a such success that his family did not have to worry about anything financially. He died on July 23, 1885 and was buried in
When he was fifteen years old, his mother died from appendicitis. From fifteen years of age to his college years, he lived in an all-white neighborhood. From 1914-1917, he shifted from many colleges and academic courses of study as well as he changed his cultural identity growing up. He studied physical education, agriculture, and literature at a total of six colleges and universities from Wisconsin to New York. Although he never completed a degree, his educational pursuits laid the foundation for his writing career.
...the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. The continuation of his success revealed his true reason for awards and acclamation could be found in his constant development of writing books and novels. These novels that Wright feverishly worked on were intended to follow the release of Native Son. However, due to his popularity of Native Son, he began to work with another individual by the name of Paul Green in order to produce different forms of his writing. Soon he would publish the stage performance variant. Although not as popular as the novel variant, the stage edition remained a hit with his supporters and audience. As Wright grew with age, he began to settle down and in March 1941 married Ellen Poplar. During his phase which allowed him to partake in various other forms of literature he eventually finished his draft of “American Hunger.”
his mother was hospitalized. He continued by moving to Boston where he worked for the
In 1971 of January, he married Tabitha Spruce. They met in the Fogler Library at University of Maine at Orono. They were both students at the university. Since he could not be a teacher automatically, him and his wife, Tabitha, worked at an industrial laundry. He started his short story writing with Men’s Magazine. He sold his stories really well through this. In 1967, He sold many books including ‘The Glass Floor’. He finally became an English teacher at Hampden High School. After his mother’s death, he and Tabitha decided to go to Colorado. After 4 years of staying in Colorado, they went back to Maine.
He lived with many different father figures before moving 40 miles south
Herbert did not immediately become a writer, but started work in journalism. He lied about his age to work for the Glendale Star in 1939. He put his writing career on hold and joined the United States navy during World War II. He married Flora Parkinson in 1941 and divorced in 1945. Herbert fathered one daughter from this marriage (Wikipedia).
Leroy Anderson was born June 29, 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents, as children, immigrated to the United States from Sweden with their families. His father, Bror Anton Anderson, worked as a postal clerk in the Central Square post office. He also played the mandolin. Anna Margareta Anderson, his mother, was the organist at the Swedish church in Cambridge. He lived in the suburbs of Boston for twenty seven years with his parents and brother.