Novelist
Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916, followed, three years later, by his second major work, Marching Men. However, he is most famous for the collection of interrelated short stories, which were published in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. He claimed that "Hands", the opening story, was the first "real" story he ever wrote. Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt the need to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White, which was rather successful.
In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, the themes of which he would carry over into much of his later writing. The novel had its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, considered Many Marriages to be Anderson's finest novel.
Beginning in 1924, Anderson lived in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B St. Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in New Orleans. There, he and his wife entertained William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson and other literary luminaries. Of Faulkner, in fact, 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.
Read more about this topic: Sherwood Anderson
Famous quotes containing the word novelist:
“The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State’s crime when it sets out to crush that individuality.”
—Ian McEwan (b. 1938)
“... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)