Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, in eighteen seventy-six, and grew up in the small town of Clyde, just a few miles from here. He worked his way up to running a paint factory in nearby Elyria, and by all appearances was a successful businessman on a conventional path. Then in nineteen twelve, at the age of thirty-six, he walked out of his office mid-sentence, left behind his business and his first marriage, and moved to Chicago to write.

The gamble paid off. In nineteen nineteen he published Winesburg, Ohio, a cycle of linked stories about small-town Midwestern life that cracked open American fiction. Its frank, psychologically layered portraits of ordinary people were unlike anything being written at the time. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both credited Anderson as a major influence. Over his career he produced twenty-seven books, but it is Winesburg that endures, a portrait of this very landscape drawn from the inside.