Winesburg, Ohio is one of the most influential twentieth-century works of fiction by an American author. Most of the major American fiction writers who emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—including Nobel Prize for Literature recipients William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck—confessed publicly that Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio had inspired their own work. Published in 1919 on the vanguard of the Modernist movement in American literature, Anderson’s book is an innovative cycle of interconnected short stories that together form a complex larger work; hence, Winesburg, Ohio is generally referred to as a novel rather than as a short-story collection.
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Born September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, to Irwin Mc Lain Anderson and Emma Smith Anderson, Sherwood Anderson grew up in Clyde, Ohio, in the northern part of the state. Clyde was Anderson’s model for the fictional community of Winesburg, Ohio, and not the actual unincorporated community known as Winesburg, which is situated in east-central Ohio. In 1903, Anderson made his first foray into publishing when he wrote the first of numerous articles he would submit to
Agricultural Advertising, a trade periodical. By the 1940s he was viewed as an elder statesman of American letters. He died in Colon, Panama, while on a good-will tour to Latin America.