Anderson was born on his grandmother's farm near Atlantic, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 1888, but he moved westward with his father, a Baptist minister, and went to high school in Iowa. After graduating from college in North Dakota, Anderson married a classmate and taught English in a high school for two years before moving to San Francisco and earning a master's degree at Stanford University. He returned to teaching, but was fired from a head-teaching job at Whittier College in 1918 because he defended a student whose antiwar articles were censored from the college newspaper. He then began writing for various newspapers and pursued his interest in poetry, which he had been writing and occasionally publishing, since he was in college.

Anderson's theatrical career began with the production on Broadway of the tragedy White Desert in 1923, and, although this play failed after twelve performances, his anti-war collaboration with Laurence...