American · 1876–1941
Sherwood Anderson broke American fiction free from plot-driven narrative. Winesburg, Ohio assembled portraits of small-town grotesques—the teacher, the doctor, the minister—each trapped by inarticulate longing. Anderson's prose sought the rhythm of American speech, the hesitations and repetitions of people struggling to express feeling. He influenced Hemingway and Faulkner, who both learned from his method even as they moved beyond it. Anderson famously walked away from his paint factory to become a writer, an act of rebellion against business civilization that matched his literary revolt against conventional storytelling. His later novels disappointed, but Winesburg remained a permanent achievement.