Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was born in Camden, Ohio, to a farming family, and grew up with his six siblings. The stories of Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life – his most familiar work – was published in 1919. It influenced an entire generation of writers, including Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. The theme of small-town America, a place where everyone knows everyone else, shaped many cinematic, musical, and literary pieces, and Anderson shaped it like no one before him has. A saying affiliated with Anderson concerns knowledge, misinformation, and miscommunication in people’s life, elements which run through his writing: “There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.” Anderson has written nine novels, and three other short story collections. He died in Panama in 1941.
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