Winesbourg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

In my essay I would like to write about a collection of stories by Sherwood Anderson
called Winesburg, Ohio. I would like to analyze this book and some of its stories and in the
end write why he is so popular in literate circuits but not as much in common population.

“He was the father of my generation of writers” said William Faulkner about
Sherwood Anderson. “The only man in America who ever taught me anything”sad Thomas Wolfe.
Richard Grey claims in his book that Ernest Hemingway, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Jean
Toomer and Erskine Caldwell were indebted to Anderson because he introduced new
methods of storytelling, in terms of style and narrative focus, and new ways of structuring
stories into a cycle.
Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Ohio. His writing career started quiet late -
the first two decades of his life he spent in small town Clyde (which later became the setting
of Winesburg) drifting from job to job (he worked as labourer or farm hand). He also served
in the Spanish-American War. He got married and became a manager of a paint factory but
suddenly walked out of the factory, left his family and left to Chicago. There he met Carl
Sandburg and Floyd Dell, who encouraged him to publish his first book, Windy McPherson´s
Son (1916). This was followed by another novel, Marching Men(1917). He also published a
book of poems, Mid-American Chants (1918), but it was not until 1919, when Winesburg,
Ohio appeared that he first attracted wider attention. Other fictional books followed,
including: Poor White (1920), Dark Laughter (1925) or Beyond Desire (1932). Anderson
wrote also non-fiction, for example: Perhaps Women (1931) or Puzzled America (1935).
Anderson died in Panama at the age of 64. The cause of death was peritonitis after he
accidentally swallowed a piece of a toothpick embedded in a martini olive at a party. He was
buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life, Not Death, is
the Great Adventure