Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson was an American fictionist born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio. Anderson spent his early years in the village of Caledonia before settling in the town of Clyde, Ohio. Anderson’s father, a Civil War veteran of the Union Army, initially worked as an employee of a harness manufacturer before taking on various odd jobs such as sign-painting. Anderson’s mother worked as a washer—cleaning and mending people’s clothing. Her death in 1895 precipitated Anderson’s departure from Clyde, bringing him to Chicago, where he began a career in advertising.

Anderson spent the next 15 years building his reputation and experience as a businessman in Ohio. Following a nervous breakdown in 1912, Anderson began to write fiction in earnest, balancing it with his career to break free from the materialistic bondage of commerce. By 1915, the first installments of what would later become Winesburg, Ohio— “The Book of the Grotesque” and “Hands”—appeared in Masses magazine. Anderson would go on to write nearly half of the stories in the collection throughout the year, though it would not be published in full until 1919 after Anderson had published two other novels.

Anderson scholars look to the family’s time in Clyde as the biographical inspiration for Winesburg, Ohio, positioning the character of George Willard as an analog for the young Sherwood Anderson. The tension between small-town life and Anderson’s life in the city informs several of the stories in the book, such as “Loneliness” and “The Thinker.” In many ways, Winesburg, Ohio can be read as Anderson’s examination of the life he lived in Clyde from the perspective of his experiences in Chicago and Cleveland, where he established his career.

Many now look upon Anderson as an early proponent of the Modernist movement in literature, signaling a shift from stark realism and plot-oriented fiction to psychological studies of character interiority and interpersonal dynamics. In his wake, prominent American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates would continue the tradition of psychological realism.