The Man from Winesburg
A Life of Sherwood Anderson
9 February 2027
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
A major biography of the tumultuous, tortuous life of Sherwood Anderson, the quintessentially American writer and author of Winesburg, Ohio.
n 1950, as he drafted his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner wrote that he and his contemporaries were “all of us children of Sherwood Anderson.” Literary father of the Lost Generation, leading figure of the Chicago literary renaissance, pioneer of the modern American short story, and author of the monumental Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson was a chronicler of the American everyman, a self-declared spokesman for an entire generation bewildered by the country’s rapid and unprecedented transformation from a historically agricultural society to an industrial behemoth.
Anderson’s literary preoccupation was the “curious loneliness, separateness, that dominates lives.” The Man from Winesburg follows his lifelong search for connection and meaning, from a hardscrabble Midwestern childhood to the peak of literary fame. The journey was anything but straightforward and often intensely painful, both for him and for others, but Anderson emerged from it as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His simple, deceptively elegant prose and his insistence on the dignity of everyday Americans influenced generations of writers, from Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck to Jane Smiley, Elizabeth Strout, and Russell Banks.
Bruce Falconer depicts Anderson’s torturous literary development in extraordinary detail while also documenting his numerous domestic and romantic imbroglios, his suicidal depressions and nervous breakdowns, and the fate of the books he wrote that were both banned and acclaimed for frankly addressing sex, repression, and perversion.
Anderson acknowledged and fought against the ugliest aspects of our nation’s soul—rapacious capitalism, economic inequality, racial enmity, social stagnation, and, above all, our seemingly intractable alienation from one another. The Man From Winesburg describes the poignant life of a writer whose story is that of America itself: full of faults, aspiring to compassion and empathy over rancor and division, and always looking for a place of belonging.
Reviews
"Sherwood Anderson contained multitudes. In this clear-eyed, sensitive, and absorbing biography, Bruce Falconer judiciously parses the mass of contradictions that animated Anderson’s strange, consequential life, weighing the evidence with care and compassion. A moving and compelling portrait." — William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
"Author of Winesburg, Ohio, a seminal book about small town life, and of several enduring short stories, Sherwood Anderson remains a powerful influence, consciously or unconsciously, on many of today’s best writers. The fullness of his achievements has been sadly underappreciated. Now, in The Man from Winesburg, Bruce Falconer has given us a sensitive, beautifully written account of a unique and uniquely American figure, whose life was as poignant and turbulent as the country he chronicled so accurately. Falconer’s book is a gift to American literary studies and to any reader fortunate enough to come across it." — Tracy Daugherty, author of Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited
"A lifelong obsession ripened into art—Bruce Falconer gives us Sherwood Anderson in full, the man who believed a self was something you made and remade at whatever cost. Outstanding." — John Jacob Kaag, author of American Philosophy: A Love Story