Background
In 1906 he became president of the United Factories Company in Cleveland, a mail-order firm for agricultural tools. This led, in 1908, to his founding a mail-order paint firm in Elyria, Ohio. While in Elyria, he began to concentrate increasingly on writing stories and novels. The conflict between business and writing resulted in nervous exhaustion in 1912. Ostensibly suffering amnesia, he wandered away from Elyria and was found several days later in Cleveland, where he was hospitalized. After his recovery, he went to Chicago in 1913 and worked as a copywriter.
At that time Chicago was experiencing a surge of interest in the arts which Anderson called aptly the "Robin's Egg Renaissance." In 1919 Anderson published his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio. Although Winesburg has been celebrated by many critics as one of the key books that began the revolt against materialism and puritanical repression in American society, its form has been commonly misunderstood. The book is not a collection of short stories. Anderson said in his Memoirs, "The stories belonged together. I felt that, taken together, they made something like a novel, a complete story." The two major unifying ideas in Winesburg are the author's viewpoint toward the town, represented by the character of George Willard, who is present throughout the book, and Anderson's concept of the "grotesque," which is set forth in the opening section, "The Book of the Grotesque." While the idea of the grotesque was derived from Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Anderson used the term differently. As he defined it, the grotesques are people defeated by false dreams, who try to create their own isolated truths and live selfishly by them, only to see them turn into falsehoods--for the truth can never be the property of an individual.
With the advent of Prohibition and the resultant corruption in Chicago, the "Robin's Egg Renaissance" ended, and Anderson left for New Orleans in 1922. There he experimented unsuccessfully with a new impressionistic style which Ernest Hemingway parodied in The Torrents of Spring. In 1927 Anderson settled in Marion, Va., where he bought and edited two weekly newspapers, one Republican and one Democratic. He was married four times and had three children by his first wife. After his fourth marriage in 1933, he and his wife, the former Eleanor Copenhaver, lived in Ripshin Farm, outside of Marion. They traveled widely during the winters. On a trip to South America in 1941, he developed peritonitis and died on Mar. 8, 1941, at Colon in the Panama Canal Zone.
In addition to Winesburg, Ohio, the most significant of Anderson's works--all of which include variations on his myth of the grotesque--are the novel Poor White (1920), a study of an agricultural society caught in the rise of industrialism; The Triumph of the Egg (1921), a book of short stories; his semi-autobiographical books, A Story Teller's Story (1924) and the posthumous Memoirs (1942), which focus on the conflict between imagination and reality; and various short stories such as "The Egg," "Death in the Woods," "The Man Who Became a Woman," and "Brother Death." Particularly in the short story, Anderson was a primary influence in American literature in the early 20th century. Instead of the story based on plot and the sentimental, happy ending that prevailed at the turn of the century, he advocated a return to the direct observation of life and wrote stories based on mood, on fragmentary actions without a formal end or beginning, and on the psychological examination of character.