Considered one of the most important literary voices to come out of the American Midwest, Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876. For the next several years the family moved from one small Ohio town to another, finally settling in Clyde in 1884. At the time, small-town America was still recovering from the Civil War, and had not yet been changed forever by industrialization. Clyde, the town Anderson used as a model for his fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio, was a small town set in the middle of farming country and had little to offer a young man who did not wish to be a farmer or a merchant.

Anderson's family was poor. His father was a harness maker, when he worked at all, and the demand for his skill lessened as industrialization grew and harnesses could be made quickly and inexpensively by machine. Anderson...