Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson was an American writer who walked out of his Ohio paint factory mid-sentence at thirty-six, apparently in a fugue state, and abandoned business for literature. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) broke the small-town idyll open and showed a generation how plain American speech could carry fiction; Hemingway and Faulkner both learned from him, then mocked him. He died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick at a party.