Sherwood Anderson
Based on Wikipedia: Sherwood Anderson
On a November day in 1912, Sherwood Anderson walked out of his paint company office in Elyria, Ohio, muttering something about his feet getting wet. He wandered for four days. When a pharmacist in Cleveland finally helped him figure out who he was, Anderson had already become someone else entirely—a man who had abandoned the American dream of business success to pursue something far less certain: the life of a writer.
This walkout has become legendary, the kind of clean break that aspiring artists fantasize about. Anderson himself spent decades polishing the story, suggesting it was a deliberate escape, a conscious rejection of commerce for art. The truth was messier. He had suffered a genuine nervous breakdown, his mind cracking under the weight of business stress, family obligations, and a secret writing life he had been nurturing in the margins of his days.
But sometimes the messy truth makes for a better story than the polished legend.
A Childhood of Constant Motion
Anderson entered the world on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio—a farming town of about six hundred fifty people tucked into the flat agricultural heart of the Midwest. His father Irwin had served in the Civil War and now made harnesses, the essential equipment that connected horses to wagons in the years before automobiles. The Andersons were considered respectable, even promising. Irwin seemed like a man going places.
Then, just before Sherwood's first birthday, the family left Camden abruptly. The reasons remain murky—debts, probably, incurred by either Irwin or his brother Benjamin. This would become a pattern.
They drifted north through villages with names like Independence and Caledonia, each move representing a step down the economic ladder. In Camden, Irwin had owned a successful shop and employed help. By the time they finally settled in Clyde, Ohio, in 1884, he could find work only as a hired hand for the very type of business he had once owned. Even that job didn't last. For the rest of Sherwood's childhood, Irwin barely scraped by as an occasional sign-painter and paperhanger, while his wife Emma took in washing.
Irwin also drank. He drank enough that it became the defining fact of his later years, a slow dissolution that would leave him estranged from his son for two decades before his death in 1919.
The Education of "Jobby"
Young Sherwood responded to his family's poverty by becoming relentlessly useful. He picked up so many odd jobs that the townspeople gave him a nickname: Jobby. Newsboy. Errand boy. Waterboy. Cow-driver. Stable groom. Assistant to his father's sign-painting business. He even assembled bicycles at the Elmore Manufacturing Company.
He was a decent student when he bothered to show up, but attendance became sporadic as work pulled him away. At fourteen, after about nine months of high school, he left school for good.
But here's what's remarkable: Anderson kept learning. Though the Anderson household contained only a few books, Sherwood borrowed voraciously from the school library, from a sympathetic school superintendent, and from John Tichenor, a local artist who recognized something in the eager young man. Clyde wouldn't even get a public library until 1903, but Anderson had already read widely by then.
He also displayed an early talent that would shape his career in unexpected ways. As a newsboy, he once convinced a tired farmer in a saloon to buy two copies of the same evening paper. The boy could sell.
Losses and Departures
By 1895, Anderson was eighteen and his family was coming apart. His father had started disappearing for weeks at a time. His older brother Karl had already left for Chicago. Then, on May 10, his mother Emma died of tuberculosis.
Sherwood found himself essentially alone. He took a room at a livery stable where he worked as a groom—an experience that would later fuel some of his best-known stories. He had a steady girlfriend named Bertha Baynes, a secure job at the bicycle factory, and a five-year commitment to the Ohio National Guard. But his mother's death had untethered something. By late 1896 or early 1897, he too had left Clyde for Chicago.
Chicago and the Spanish-American War
Anderson landed at a boardinghouse in Chicago owned by a former mayor of Clyde. His brother Karl was studying at the Art Institute, and Sherwood moved in with him, quickly finding work at a cold-storage plant. When Karl moved away, Sherwood relocated to a cramped two-room flat with his sister and two younger brothers, all newly arrived from Clyde. Money was desperately tight—he earned two dollars for a ten-hour day—but with occasional help from Karl, they managed.
Following his brother's example and that of his lifelong friend Cliff Paden, Anderson enrolled in night school at the Lewis Institute. He took classes including "New Business Arithmetic," where he finished second in his class. More importantly, he attended lectures on Robert Browning and may have first encountered the poetry of Walt Whitman. For a young man who had left school at fourteen, this was a revelation: education could continue indefinitely, on one's own terms.
Then the United States prepared to enter the Spanish-American War, and Anderson's first Chicago chapter ended.
Despite his limited resources, he bought a new suit and returned to Clyde to enlist. His company trained at various southern encampments before shipping to Cuba in early 1899—four months after fighting had ceased. They saw no combat. According to historian Irving Howe, Anderson was popular with his fellow soldiers, who remembered him as a man given to prolonged reading (mostly dime westerns and historical romances) and talented at finding a girl when he wanted one. "For the first of these traits he was frequently teased," Howe noted, "but the second brought him the respect it usually does in armies."
The Education Continues
After the war, Anderson did something unusual for a twenty-three-year-old who had been working since childhood: he went back to school. In September 1899, he joined his siblings Karl and Stella in Springfield, Ohio, where he enrolled for his senior year at Wittenberg Academy, a preparatory school on the campus of Wittenberg University.
He performed well, earning good marks and participating in extracurricular activities. In the spring of 1900, he graduated, delivering a commencement speech on Zionism as one of eight students selected for the honor.
More significant than the formal education was what happened at The Oaks, the boardinghouse where Anderson lived and worked as a "chore boy." The residents included businessmen, educators, and creative types who took an interest in the young man. A high school teacher named Trillena White, ten years his senior, would walk with him in the evenings—raising eyebrows among the other boarders. According to Anderson, she "first introduced me to fine literature." She would later inspire several of his characters, including the teacher Kate Swift in his masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio.
Another boarder, Harry Simmons, worked as advertising manager for a publishing company. He was so impressed by Anderson's commencement speech that he offered him a job on the spot as an advertising solicitor at his company's Chicago office.
And so, in the summer of 1900, Anderson returned to Chicago—this time as a white-collar worker with prospects.
The Advertising Years
Anderson had a gift for advertising. This might seem ironic for a man who would later be celebrated for his psychological depth and literary honesty, but there's actually a through line. Good advertising requires understanding what people want, what they fear, what they dream about. It demands the ability to capture attention quickly and hold it. These are not so different from the skills of a short story writer.
After leaving his first advertising job due to conflicts with his boss, Anderson joined the Frank B. White Advertising Company, where he sold ads and wrote copy for farming implements. He also contributed articles to the trade journal Agricultural Advertising. His first professional publication appeared in February 1902: a piece called "The Farmer Wears Clothes."
Over the next several years, he published approximately twenty-nine articles and essays for his company's magazine, plus two for a small literary magazine. The two monthly columns he wrote for Agricultural Advertising—"Rot and Reason" and "Business Types"—were essentially character sketches, the kind of writing that would later become his signature in Winesburg, Ohio.
He was learning his craft, even if he didn't know it yet.
Marriage and Ascent
On a business trip around May 1903, Anderson stopped at the home of a friend from Clyde who was living in Toledo. There he met Cornelia Pratt Lane, daughter of a wealthy Ohio businessman. A year later, they married. They would have three children: Robert Lane, John Sherwood, and Marion.
Anderson continued to rise in the advertising world. In 1906, an opportunity came from one of his clients: he left Chicago for Cleveland to become president of United Factories Company, a mail-order firm. The job amounted to sales manager, but the title was impressive. The Andersons entertained frequently. They attended church on Sundays, Sherwood resplendent in morning clothes and top hat. On Sunday afternoons, Cornelia taught him French.
Then disaster struck. One of the manufacturers whose products United Factories marketed produced a large batch of defective incubators. Anderson had personally guaranteed all products sold. Letters began arriving from customers—desperate, angry, demanding answers. The strain of responding to hundreds of these complaints while maintaining his demanding schedule at work and home led to a nervous breakdown in the summer of 1907.
This was the first breakdown. The famous one was still five years away.
Elyria and the Secret Life
Anderson recovered quickly enough to start over. In September 1907, the family moved to Elyria, Ohio, a town of about ten thousand, where he rented a warehouse within sight of the railroad and began a mail-order business selling a preservative paint called "Roof-Fix" at a five hundred percent markup.
The business thrived. Anderson purchased and absorbed several similar companies, expanding his product lines under the name Anderson Paint Company. By late 1911, he had secured financial backing to merge his companies into the American Merchants Company, a profit-sharing and investment firm built around a scheme he called "Commercial Democracy."
On the surface, Anderson had achieved the American dream: successful businessman, respectable family man, pillar of the community. But something else was happening in the margins. Somewhere in those Elyria years, Anderson had begun to write—not advertising copy, not trade journal articles, but fiction. Stories. Novels. The kind of writing that had nothing to do with selling paint or incubators.
He was living two lives, and the strain was building.
The Walkout
On Thursday, November 28, 1912—Thanksgiving Day—Anderson arrived at his office in a slightly nervous state. His secretary later recalled that he opened some mail and began dictating a business letter. Then he became distracted. He wrote a note to his wife. He murmured something about his feet being wet, and getting wetter.
Then he walked out.
For four days, no one knew where he was. On Sunday, December 1, a disoriented Anderson entered a drugstore on East 152nd Street in Cleveland and asked the pharmacist to help figure out who he was. Unable to understand the incoherent man's words, the pharmacist discovered a phone book on Anderson's person and called the number of Edwin Baxter, a member of the Elyria Chamber of Commerce. Baxter came, recognized Anderson, and had him admitted to Huron Road Hospital in downtown Cleveland. When Cornelia arrived, her husband barely recognized her.
The initial news reports blamed overwork and noted Anderson's inability to remember what had happened. But within days, the story began to change. The Elyria Evening Telegram reported—perhaps spuriously—that Anderson had deliberately placed himself in a trance and would write a book about his sensations as a wandering nomad.
Anderson himself spent the rest of his life refining this version. In his memoirs, published after his death, he wrote: "I wanted to leave, get away from business. ... Again I resorted to slickness, to craftiness. ... The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out."
This makes for a better legend: the artist consciously rejecting commerce, walking away from success to pursue truth and beauty. The reality—a genuine mental break, a mind pushed past its limits—is less romantic but perhaps more honest, and more human.
The Writer Emerges
After his breakdown, Anderson did not immediately become a famous author. He returned to Chicago, eventually divorcing Cornelia and remarrying three more times. He worked again in advertising while writing in his spare time. His first novel wasn't published until 1916.
But in 1919, everything changed. Winesburg, Ohio appeared—not a novel exactly, but a sequence of interconnected short stories about the lonely, frustrated, secretly yearning inhabitants of a small Midwestern town. The book drew on everything Anderson had experienced: his Clyde childhood, his stable-groom years, the characters he had sketched for trade journals, the psychological intensity of people trying to connect but failing.
The book launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published prolifically: short story collections, novels, memoirs, essays, even poetry. His only bestseller was Dark Laughter in 1925, inspired by his time in New Orleans, but his influence extended far beyond sales figures.
A young writer named Ernest Hemingway considered Anderson a mentor before famously turning against him. William Faulkner acknowledged his debt to Anderson's work. The character sketches Anderson had practiced in trade journals, the psychological depth he brought to ordinary people, the willingness to explore the inner lives of those who seemed unremarkable—these became hallmarks of modern American fiction.
The Legacy of Walking Away
Sherwood Anderson died on March 8, 1941, at the age of sixty-four, while on a cruise to South America. The cause was peritonitis, apparently triggered by a toothpick he had accidentally swallowed at a cocktail party. It's the kind of absurd death that might appear in one of his own stories.
But his famous walkout lives on as a kind of secular parable. Every frustrated office worker who dreams of quitting, every aspiring artist trapped in a practical career, every person who suspects there might be another life waiting if they could only reach it—they all recognize something in Anderson's story.
The truth, of course, is complicated. Anderson didn't simply choose art over commerce; he suffered a genuine psychological crisis. He didn't immediately achieve literary success; he spent years struggling in obscurity. His later life included failed marriages, financial difficulties, and uneven work.
But he did walk out. And he did become a writer. And the work he created—particularly those luminous, melancholy stories of Winesburg, Ohio—changed American literature.
Sometimes the messy, complicated truth is enough. Sometimes a man with wet feet, wandering through Cleveland, not quite knowing who he is, ends up becoming exactly who he was meant to be.