SUMMARY Sherwood Anderson was a poet, novelist, essayist, businessman, and newspaper editor most often associated with the American Midwest. His notable collection of related short stories,
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), examined small-town life in the late 1800s. Anderson moved in the highest of American literary circles, entertaining and to some extent even influencing such writers as William Faulkner (about whom Anderson wrote the short story “A Meeting South”) and Ernest Hemingway, who parodied Anderson in his debut novel
The Torrents of Spring (1926). Anderson moved to southwestern Virginia in 1926, where he spent the rest of his years chronicling life in the depression-era South.