Sherman was born to New Englanders John and Ada Martha (Pratt) Sherman on 1 October 1881 in Anita, Iowa. Despite moving to this more healthful climate, Sherman’s father, a druggist and lover of music and poetry, died when Sherman was just eleven.
Williams College.
The family later relocated to Rolfe, Iowa and finally, in 1887, to Los Angeles, California. The family subsequently returned to New England. Upon graduation, Sherman became an instructor at Northwestern University for one year before moving to the University of Illinois (U of I).
In 1908 he was offered a position of the staff of The Nation, to which he was a frequent contributor, but declined when U of I made him an associate professor
He became a full professor in 1911 and permanent chairman of the U of I English Department in 1914 where he built the department into one of the strongest in the Midwest. In April 1924, Sherman became editor of “Books,” the literary supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, which became under his editorship the leading American critical journal of the day.
This began a decade long, erudite, and witty feud between these literary titans. The next salvo from Sherman was an article in the October 1920 issue of Bookman, “Is There Anything to be Said for Literary Traditions?” where he attacked literary modernism broadside.
As the decade of the 1920s unfolded, however, many argue that Sherman moved perceptibly to the left, eventually embracing modernism and confessing that he had erred in trying to make men good instead of happy.
With the entry of the United States into the Great War, Sherman expressed what some deemed a chauvinistic patriotism in an address before the National Council of Teachers of English on 1 December 1917, denouncing both the philosophy of Nietzsche and his American apologist, Henry Louis Mencken. Interpreting the challenge to conventional morals by younger literary figures as moral relativism, Sherman defended traditional values, nationalism, and even Puritanism, a popular scapegoat of the time.
