Associate Professor,
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was a prolific, profound, provocative and perceptive writer of short stories. In the recent decades, however, there has been a revival of considerable scholarly critical interest in his life and all that he wrote including his writings as writer of advertising copy for different advertising companies. He is recognized as one of the really important and significant creative writers of the first few decades of the 20th century. Further, it is acknowledged that he “remained a profound, provocative and perceptive writer to the end, and that he has much to say” to the present time. The short story became the most popular of fictional forms at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in America. Almost every important writer of fiction during the first half of the century- Scott Fitzerald, Earnest Hemingway, William Faulkner and others among them handled this form of short fiction with distinction, exploring and revealing its possibilities to give expression to contemporary life and sensibility. Frank O Connor, who had an acute sense of national values, was led on to declare way back in 1963 that “the Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form”. The contribution of Sherwood Anderson to this phenomenal development was by no means ordinary and has influence on other writers of short stories among his immediate contemporaries and those of the newer generations. “Anderson reshaped the American short story, making it his own, and at the same time prepared the ground work for the revolutionary writers who would follow them”.
