The View from Pompey's Head

Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Clyde. In 1898 he joined the U.S. Army and served in the Spanish-American War. In 1900 he enrolled in the Wittenberg Academy. The following year he moved to Chicago where he began a successful business career in advertising.

Despite his business success, in 1912 Anderson walked away to pursue writing full time. His first novel was Windy McPherson's Son, published in 1916, and his second was Marching Men, published in 1917. The phenomenally successful Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short stories about fictionalized characters in a small midwestern town, followed in 1919. Anderson wrote novels including The Triumph of the Egg, Poor White, Many Marriages, and Dark Laughter, but it was his short stories that made him famous. Through his short stories he revolutionized short fiction and altered the direction of the modern short story. He is credited with influencing such writers as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Anderson died in March, 1941, of peritonitis suffered during a trip to South America. The epitaph he wrote for himself proclaims, "Life, not death, is the great adventure."

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