Sherwood Anderson — Inspirational American Writer of Brilliance
The Paint Man Cometh
Sherwood Anderson is, with each passing year, becoming less and less well known as a writer (he died in 1941), and even less as the great inspiration for Ernest Hemingway, whose style was born out of the lean photographic prose that was Anderson’s, with his 1919 collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, a masterpiece of that prose:
“ He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.”
The above is a wonderful example of Anderson’s vivid and controlled prose, that was, over one hundred years ago, something quite new. No wonder then that Anderson took such a keen interest in the early writings of Ernest Hemingway, helping him in anyway he could, with Hemingway throwing it all back in the older writer’s face. The young can be very cruel at times. But then post traumatic stress disorder may have had something to…
