Sherwood Anderson Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876 in Camden, Ohio, and was the third of seven kids born to Emma Jane (nee Smith) and ex-Union soldier and harness maker Irwin McLain Anderson.

He never finished high school because he was forced to work at the age of fourteen in order to support his family. He had been a decent student, but his attendance declined after he had started picking up work, and left school for good after about nine months of high school.

Anderson worked as an errand boy, newsboy, waterboy, stable groom, and cow-driver, as well as perhaps printer’s devil, not to mention an assistant to Irwin Anderson, Sign Painter. Additionally he worked assembling bicycles for the Elmore Manufacturing Company.

Even during his teens, his talent for selling was quite evident, and was a talent he’d later draw on in his successful career in advertising. While a newsboy, he was said to have convinced this tired farmer in a saloon to buy two copies of the same exact evening paper. Besides all of the work, his childhood resembled that of other boys his own age.

Anderson was a voracious reader. Despite there only being a few books in the Anderson home, he read widely by borrowing a lot of books from the school library, and the personal libraries of a school superintendent and John Tichenor, a local artist that responded to Sherwood’s interest.

By the year 1912, he was the successful manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, and the dad of three kids by his first of four wives. That same year, he deserted both his job and his family. In 1913, he moved to Chicago, where he devoted more of his time to his imaginative writing. Sherwood became a heroic model for younger writers because he broke with what the had considered to be convention and American materialism to commit himself to his art.

Anderson and Cornelia Lane married in the year 1904, had his only three kids, and they divorced in 1916. He then married the sculptor Tennessee Claflin Mitchell quickly, whom he then divorced in the year 1924 in Reno, Nevada.

Then in 1924, he married Elizabeth Norma Prall, a friend of Faulkner’s whom he’d met in New York just before his divorce from Mitchell. After several years, this marriage also failed, with them divorcing in the year 1932.

In the year 1928, he became involved with Elanor Gladys Copenhaver, whom he got married to in 1933. They traveled and studied often together, and were both active in the trade union movement. He also became close to Copenhaver’s mom, Laura.

He was an American writer that was mainly known for his short stories, most notably the Winesburg, Ohio collection. The 22 stories explore the lives of different inhabitants of Winesburg, which is a fictional version of Clyde, Ohio, the tiny farm town where Anderson lived for roughly twelve years of his early life.

These tales made a significant break with the traditional American short story. Anderson, rather than emphasize action and plot, used a precise, simple, unsentimental style to reveal the loneliness, frustration, and longing in the lives of each of his characters. These are characters that have been stunted by the narrowness of Midwestern small town life as well as by their own limitations.

That work’s influence on American fiction was a profound one, and its literary voice can be heard in the works of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck, as well as others.

He died at the age of 64 on March 8, 1941, having taken ill during a cruise to South America. He’d been feeling abdominal discomfort for a few days, which later was diagnosed as peritonitis. An autopsy revealed that a swallowed toothpick had done some internal damage and resulted in peritonitis.

“Poor White” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 1920. Hugh McVey was born in a small hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was just a miserable place to be born in. With just the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river bank, the land for ten miles back from the town, and is called “Mudcat Landing”, in derision by river men, and was almost entirely unproductive and worthless.

The soil: shallow, yellow, and stony, was tilled, during Hugh’s time, by a race of long gaunt men that seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land they lived on. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchant and artisans of the town were in the same state.

The merchants, who ran their own stores, which are poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs, on the credit system, couldn’t get the money to pay for the goods that they handed out over the counters and the artisans, carpenters, the shoemakers, and harness makers, couldn’t get the money for the work they did.

Only the town’s pair of saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold off their wares for cash and, while the men in the town and the farmers that drove into town felt that without drink life was rather unbearable, cash could always be found for the purpose of getting drunk.

“Many Marriages” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 1923. A Wisconsin man rejects his middle-class life in a controversial novel from 1923 about madness and sexual freedom.

This is John Webster’s story. He’s a prosperous and quiet washing machine manufacturer, getting closer to forty. He lives in Wisconsin with Mary, his wife, and Jane, their seventeen year old daughter. They are the ideal American family in a lot of ways, until a certain madness takes hold of John; which is a madness which might in fact be the sudden dawning of sanity.

John, like so many men and women, has these dreams that he feels compelled to crush so that he can function in his prosperous and quiet life. However down deep inside his body, there is something starting to affect him, it’s this irrepressible feeling of not totally being himself. It comes over him with all of the excitement of springtime, and before long it’ll change him, and his life, forever.