sherwoodanderson演講稿.doc

OverviewSherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story teller. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. He is best known for his short stories that reflect his small-town, Midwestern past. Described as “brooding Midwest tales,” they reveal “their authors sympathetic insight into the thwarted lines of ordinary people.” This kind child of a harness maker and sometimes house painter had a fondess for storytelling.Personal LifeOn September 13, 1876 Sherwood Anderson was born to Irwin M. and Emma Smith Anderson in Camden, Ohio. He was their third child. The family was forced to move shortly after Sherwood was born because his fathers small business had failed. They finally settled permanently in Clyde, Ohio in 1884. The income was rarely adequate without the added help of the childrens income. Due to the difficulties, Andersons father began drinking heavily and his mother died in 1895. Sherwood was eager to take on odd jobs and earned the name Jobby. However, his interests caused him to miss school often. He finally left high school before graduating. In 1896, Anderson left Clyde for Chicago where his brother Karl was living. He worked as a manual laborer until enrolling in the army for service in Cuba during the Spanish-American WarAfter the War, he again followed his brother who had taken a job as an artist for the Crowell Publishing Company in Springfield, Ohio. In September of 1900, Anderson attended the Wittenberg Academy. Earning his food and lodging as a chore boy at the artists boardinghouse, Anderson encountered a highly cultured environment. Ironically, the influence of the artists was most important to Anderson for his advance in the business world. The Crowell advertising manager secured him a job in Chicago as a copywriter. He was highly successful in this position. In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio wholesaler. Although he hoped to become an artist, he lived as a bourgeois husband and father of three for a couple of years. He left Chicago for Northern Ohio in 1906 and over the next six years, he managed a mail-order business in Cleveland and then two paint manufacturing firms. Yet, Anderson increasingly spent his free time writing.Sherwood Andersons life was in a way archetypal of literary lives in modern America. His personality was peculiar in a very interesting fashion. At a certain point in his life, when he was about 36, already a successful businessman with a happy family, he suffered a nervous breakdown. The fact of the matter was that he had been tormented by what may be rightly called “a divided self.” Feeling that he could be servant to words only, he found it impossible to carry on the piant business which, as “a smooth son of a bitch”(he usually called himself), he had been working smoothly well with his colleagues to make very prosperous. He felt called upon to undertake a nobler vocation, to be loyal to his soul and become a writer. After he had worked for a few years, acting the manager by day and writing novels at night, the clash came to a head. One day, in the middle of the dictation, he stopped and left his office, never to return. He was found wandering about in a confused condition and was sent to a hospital. Thus he said farewell to the business world. In time he found himself in Chicago again where he had worked as a laborer in his early twenties.By the turn of the century, Chicago had become a cultural center in the Midwest. It was there that Poetry and The Little Review were founded and became well known in Europe as well as in America. And there also it was that new authors and new works were introduced with great enthusiasm. For some time Anderson lived by writing advertisements for an agency while working on his novels.He sent for his family, wrote the circulars as he once had, and continued to write feverishly in his free time. In 1914, he divorced Cornelia and married Tennessee Mitchell. That same year his first novel was published, entitled Windy McPhersons Son. Along with his second, Marching Men, of 1917, he later commented that his first novels were raw and immature. He is best known for his classic collection of tales, Winesburg, Ohio, which he had begun writing in 1915 and generally wrote in the order the stories appear in the text. The book was published in 1919 and received much acclaim, establishing him as a talented modern American author.In 1922, Anderson separated from Mitchell before marrying Elizabeth Prall two years later. The faulty novel Many Marriages was published in 1923 and Dark Laughter in 1925. He traveled to Virginia and took such a liking to the countryside that he bought land there. In 1927, he also bought Virginias Marion Publishing Company and became the editor of two newspapers. After another failed marriage, Anderson married Eleanor Copenhaver, with whom he finally appeared happy. They traveled a great deal and studied social conditions. Among his publications concerning this matter in the 1930s were Death in the Woods and Other Stories of 1933; Puzzled America, a book of essays; and Kit Brandon, a novel that he finished in 1936. Though his influence was dying out during this period, very significant American passages of prose exist in his writing through the very end. Many of these passages have been overlooked because of their place within a larger faulty work. In years since, Anderson has been rediscovered and appreciated as idealizing the modes of thought and societal themes he had been criticized for after his peak. Anderson died of peritonitis in March of 1941 on his way to visit Panama.Influence Sherwood Anderson had an important influence upon American writing between World War I and World War II. He is credited with capturing the real sound of everyday speech in his writing and experimenting with new forms and styles, breaking down tired, old formulas. He influenced a whole generation of writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Many experienced writers have stressed that a young writer should write about what he or she knows best. While in New Orleans in 1924, Anderson encouraged Faulkner to write about his home county in Mississippi.He encouraged Faulkner that “ ”.But Sherwood Anderson himself forgot that all he wrote about was his hometown- a part of Ohio. Then he gave up his familiar town and figures. And he transferred his lyrical style to the social novels of Henry James and novels of psychological analysis from David Herbert Lawrence.He criticized southern America, although he lived there. He abused not only black people but also white people.