Sherwood Anderson life and biography

Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz, among others.

Author of books:
Windy McPherson's Son (1916, novel)
Marching Men (1917, novel)
Winesburg, Ohio (1919, short stories)
Poor White (1920, novel)
The Triumph of the Egg (1921, short storie)
Horses and Men (1923, short stories)
A Story-Teller's Story (1924, novel, semi-autobiographical)
Dark Laughter (1925, novel)
Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926, novel, semi-autobiographical)
Hello Towns (1929, short stories)
Beyond Desire (1932, novel)
Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933, short stories)
Puzzled America (1935, essays)
Kit Brandon (1936, novel)
Memoirs (1942, memoir)
Letters (1953, letters)
Return to Winesburg (1967, essays)
The Memoirs of Sherwood Anderson (1969, memoir)
The Buck Fever Papers (1971, essays)

Mentored William Faulkner, he wrote his ambiguous and moving short story "A Meeting South," and, in 1925, wrote Dark Laughter, a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience. Although the book is now out of print (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring), it was Anderson's only bestseller.

Died from peritonitis in Panama, at the age of 64 while on a cruise to South America. An autopsy revealed that he had accidentally swallowed a toothpick (presumably in a martini olive), which had perforated his colon and caused a fatal case of peritonitis. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure."

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