Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson 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, his only bestseller was Dark Laughter, a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the 1920s.
Early life
Sherwood Berton Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, at 142 S. Lafayette Street in Camden, Ohio, a farming town with a population of around 650. He was the third of seven children born to Emma Jane and former Union soldier and harness-maker Irwin McLain Anderson. Considered reasonably well-off financially, Anderson's father was seen as an up-and-comer by his Camden contemporaries, but the family left town just before Sherwood's first birthday. Reasons for the departure are uncertain; most biographers note rumors of debts incurred by either Irwin or his brother Benjamin. The Andersons headed north to Caledonia by way of a brief stay in a village of a few hundred called Independence. Four or five years were spent in Caledonia, years that formed Anderson's earliest memories. This period later inspired his semi-autobiographical novel Tar: A Midwest Childhood. In Caledonia Anderson's father began drinking excessively, which led to financial difficulties, eventually causing the family to leave the town.With each move, Irwin Anderson's prospects dimmed; while in Camden he was the proprietor of a successful shop and could employ an assistant, but by the time the Andersons finally settled down in Clyde, Ohio, in 1884, Irwin could get work only as a hired man to harness manufacturers. That job was short-lived, and for the rest of Sherwood Anderson's childhood, his father barely supported the family as an occasional sign-painter and paperhanger, while his mother took in washing to make ends meet. Partly as a result of these misfortunes, young Sherwood became adept at finding various odd jobs to help his family, earning the nickname "Jobby".
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.
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 youth read widely by borrowing from the school library and the personal libraries of a school superintendent and of John Tichenor, a local artist, who responded to Anderson's interest.
By Anderson's 18th year in 1895, his family was on shaky ground. His father had started to disappear for weeks. Two years earlier, in 1893, Karl, Sherwood's elder brother, had left Clyde for Chicago. On May 10, 1895, his mother succumbed to tuberculosis. Sherwood, now essentially on his own, boarded at the Harvey & Yetter's livery stable where he worked as a groom—an experience that would translate into several of his best-known stories. Two months before his mother's death, in March 1895, Anderson had signed up with the Ohio National Guard for a five-year hitch, while he was going steady with Bertha Baynes, an attractive girl and possibly the inspiration for Helen White in Winesburg, Ohio, and he was working a secure job at the bicycle factory. But his mother's death precipitated his leaving Clyde. He settled in Chicago around late 1896 or the spring or summer of 1897, having worked a few small-town factory jobs along the way.
Chicago and war
Anderson moved to a boardinghouse in Chicago owned by a former mayor of Clyde. His brother Karl lived in the city and was studying at the Art Institute. Anderson moved in with him and quickly found a job at a cold-storage plant. In late 1897, Karl moved away, and Anderson relocated to a two-room flat with his sister and two younger brothers newly come from Clyde. Money was tight—Anderson earned "two dollars for a day of ten hours"— but with occasional support from Karl, they got by. Following the example of his Clyde confederate and lifelong friend Cliff Paden and Karl, Anderson took up the idea of furthering his education by enrolling in night school at the Lewis Institute. He attended several classes regularly including "New Business Arithmetic" earning marks that placed him second in the class. It was also there that Anderson heard lectures on Robert Browning and was possibly first introduced to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Soon, however, Anderson's first stint in Chicago would come to an end as the United States prepared to enter the Spanish–American War.Although he had limited resources while in Chicago, Anderson bought a new suit and returned to Clyde to join the military. Once home, the company he joined mustered into the army at Camp Bushnell, Ohio on May 12, 1898. Several months of training followed at various southern encampments until early in 1899, when his company was sent to Cuba. Fighting had ceased four months prior to their arrival. On April 21, 1899, they left Cuba having seen no combat. According to Irving Howe, "Sherwood was popular among his army comrades, who remembered him as a fellow given to prolonged reading, mostly in dime westerns and historical romances, and talented at finding a girl when he wanted one. For the first of these traits he was frequently teased, but the second brought him the respect it usually does in armies."
After the war, Anderson resided briefly in Clyde performing agricultural work before deciding to return to school. In September 1899 Anderson joined his siblings Karl and Stella in Springfield, Ohio where, at the age of twenty-three he enrolled for his senior year of preparatory school at the Wittenberg Academy, a preparatory school located on the campus of the Wittenberg University. In his time there he performed well, earning good marks and participating in several extracurricular activities. In the spring of 1900 Anderson graduated from the academy, offering a discourse on Zionism as one of the eight students chosen to give a commencement speech.
Business, marriage and family
During his time in Springfield, Anderson stayed and worked as a "chore boy" in a boardinghouse called The Oaks among a group of businessmen, educators, and other creative types, many of whom became friendly with the young Anderson. In particular, a high school teacher named Trillena White and a businessman Harry Simmons played a role in the author's life. The former, who was ten years Anderson's senior, would walk—raising eyebrows among the other boarders—with the young man in the evenings. More importantly, according to Anderson, she "first introduced me to fine literature" and would later serve as inspiration for a number of his characters including the teacher Kate Swift in Winesburg, Ohio. The latter, who worked as the advertising manager for Mast, Crowell, and Kirkpatrick and occasionally took meals at The Oaks, was so impressed by Anderson's commencement speech that he offered him a job on the spot as an advertising solicitor at his company's Chicago office. Thus, in the summer of 1900, Anderson returned to Chicago where most of his siblings were now living, intent on achieving success in his new white-collar occupation.Though he performed well, problems with his boss and a dislike for the office routine and for the style of correspondence, which caused the ultimate rift, caused Anderson to leave Crowell in mid-1901 for a position set up for him by Marco Marrow, another friend from The Oaks, at the Frank B. White Advertising Company. There the author stayed until 1906, selling ads and writing advertising copy for manufacturers of farming implements and articles for the trade journal, Agricultural Advertising. In this latter magazine Anderson published his first professional work, a February 1902 piece called "The Farmer Wears Clothes." What followed were approximately 29 articles and essays for his company's magazine, and two for a small literary magazine published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company called The Reader. According to scholar Welford Dunaway Taylor, the two monthly columns Anderson wrote for Agricultural Advertising exemplified the "character writing" that would later become a notable part of the author's approach in Winesburg, Ohio and other works.
Part of Anderson's job in those early years of his career was making trips to solicit potential clients. On one of these trips around May 1903 he stopped in the home of a friend from Clyde, Jane "Jennie" Bemis, then living in Toledo, Ohio. It was there that he met Cornelia Pratt Lane, the daughter of wealthy Ohio businessman Robert Lane. The two were married a year later, on the 16th of May, in Lucas, Ohio. They would go on to have three children—Robert Lane, John Sherwood, and Marion. After a short honeymoon, the couple moved into an apartment on the south side of Chicago. For two additional years, Anderson worked for Long-Critchfield until an opportunity came along from one of the accounts he managed and so on Labor Day 1906, Sherwood Anderson left Chicago for Cleveland to become president of United Factories Company, a mail-order firm selling various items from surrounding firms.
While his new job, which amounted to the position of sales manager, could be stressful the happy home life Cornelia had fostered in Chicago continued in Cleveland; "his wife and he entertained frequently. They went to church on Sundays, with Anderson decked out in morning clothes and top hat. On occasional Sunday afternoons Cornelia taught him French. She also helped with his advertising work." His home life could not sustain him when one of the manufacturers United Factories marketed produced a large batch of defective incubators. Soon, letters addressed to Anderson began to arrive from customers both desperate and angry. The strain from months of answering hundreds of these letters while continuing his demanding schedule at work and home led to a nervous breakdown in the summer of 1907 and eventually his departure from the company.
His failure in Cleveland did not delay him for long, however, because in September 1907, the Andersons moved to Elyria, Ohio, a town of approximately ten thousand residents, where he rented a warehouse within sight of the railroad and began a mail-order business selling a preservative paint called "Roof-Fix". The first years in Elyria went very well for Anderson and his family; two more children were added for a total of three in addition to a busy social life for their parents. So well, in fact, did the Anderson Manufacturing Co. do that Anderson was able to purchase and absorb several similar businesses and expand his firm's product-lines under the name Anderson Paint Company. Carrying on that momentum, in late 1911 Anderson secured the financial backing to merge his companies into the American Merchants Company, a profit-sharing/investment firm operating in part on a scheme he developed around that time called "Commercial Democracy".