Some big, fat biographies are largely gas and bloat – a prime example is last year’s life of Patrick O’Brian (the first of two volumes) by his stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy. Others are mostly muscle and sinew and worthy of their great heft, like this life of Sherwood Anderson (also the first of two volumes) by longtime Anderson scholar Walter B. Rideout, professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Rideout’s new “Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume I” (University of Wisconsin Press, 648 pages, $60) is only the second full-fledged biography of the author of “Winesburg, Ohio” in a half-century, and massively more complete than the previous one-
volume life by Kim Townsend. Anderson, one of the founders of 20th-century American literature, shows signs of being forgotten, and so it is good to have this solid work to remind us of his importance.
Anderson, born in 1876 to a poor family in Camden, Ohio, grew up in Clyde, Ohio (the original Winesburg), and moved in 1897 to Chicago. He lived there off and on for many years before leaving to wander the country.
Eventually becoming an advertising copywriter, he worked at that trade, unhappily, for the next 20 years. He spent some time running a manufacturing business, but he could always fall back on copywriting to support his family.
Some of his best writing was done while working in advertising, including “Winesburg” (a collection of stories) and “Poor White,” which Rideout calls his best novel. During the early years he articulated what would be a central theme in his whole body of work: “the coupling of outward, materialistic success and inner, spiritual failure.”
Business life was never satisfying; Rideout says Anderson saw “business as quite literally life-denying and … art as quite literally life-fulfilling.” Eventually, crumbling under self-imposed pressure to “make good,” he had one breakdown, and then another. He chucked his business, his marriage and his family and went on to make literature his life.
His personal life was anything but tidy. He was married four times. “What he feared,” Rideout says, “was not women as such, but rather their capacity, as he perceived it, for possessiveness, for making sex the center of a relation.”
Two things may strike the reader about Anderson’s writing career. One is that he never made much money from it.
The other is its short length. To be sure, writing of one sort or another was his reason for existence from the time he began as a copywriter until his death in 1941. But his first stories were not published until he was almost 40, and his best work was done in a span of a few years. By 1926 even he had begun to suspect he had written himself out (though several more books were to come).
He was in many ways a generous man. He extended himself to help struggling writers, including William Faulkner, who lived with Anderson for a short time, and Ernest Hemingway. Both repaid him by attacking him later, Hemingway by writing a vicious, spiteful parody of one of Anderson’s books.
This volume ends in late 1927, just as Anderson, the end of his third marriage in sight, has moved to southwestern Virginia to buy and edit two weekly newspapers. Some readers may object that 699 pages of text, despite their solid writing and scholarship, are too many to tell 51 years of a life that would last only 14 more.
In one respect they would have a point: The detailed explications of novels and short stories do tend to grow wearisome. On the other hand, they succeed wonderfully in, first, showing the close parallels of his fiction to his life, and in explaining Anderson’s central concerns – his emotional link to his native Midwest, his special brand of realism, his “skill at catching sympathetically the quality of poor people’s lives” and his “feeling for the failures and the misfits, the despised and neglected.”
This will surely be the definitive biography of Anderson for beyond the foreseeable future. A perusal of the endnotes shows that some of Rideout’s research and interviews go back 50 years. It is difficult to believe that anyone else will put this much labor into Anderson’s life.
Indeed, this book is not just praiseworthy as a superb portrayal of its subject. It is a testament – even a throwback – to the sort of dedicated, painstaking literary scholarship that is rarely seen anymore in our technophilic age.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
