Sherwood Anderson

Anderson worked years in advertising and then ran a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, before a nervous breakdown in 1912 sent him walking out of the office mid-dictation and, by his own later, much-embellished account, out of business entirely, a flight from bourgeois respectability he mythologized for the rest of his career.

Winesburg, Ohio, his interlocking cycle of stories about a small Ohio town's isolated, warped inner lives (its 'grotesques') narrated loosely through a young reporter eager to escape them, replaced the ornate late-Victorian sentence with something plainer and more elliptical, closer to speech. Hemingway and Faulkner both later credited him as a formative influence, then spent years publicly distancing themselves from him.

In Chicago he mentored the young Hemingway, writing him letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein's Paris circle, and in New Orleans he helped get Faulkner's first novel published. His own later work never matched Winesburg's impact, and he died in 1941 of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick on a Panama-bound cruise: an absurd end to a career built on plain truths.