舍伍德·安德森(Sherwood Anderson，1876-1941)，1876年9月13日出生在中西部俄亥俄州克萊德鎮的一個貧寒家庭。為了幫助家里，安德森從小就干過各種各樣的活，沒有受過多少正規的學校教育。短暫的參軍后，他開始下海經商。在過著生意興隆的商人生活的同時，他也在悄悄地寫小說。由于被生意中、個人生活中和藝術生活中的種種問題所困擾，在1912年的一天，他突然離家出走，決心用自己的筆過另一種更有意義的生活。到了芝加哥后，他加入了芝加哥的文人圈子。
My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own, and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmhands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head’s saloon-crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farmhands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o’clock father drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for the night, and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.
It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country schoolteacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them.
It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a schoolteacher she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of how Garfield, Fin coin, and other Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness, and as I lay beside her-in the days of her lying-in-she may have dreamed that I would Some day rule men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand, sell his horse, and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and myself she was incurably ambitious.
The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Grigg’s Road, eight miles from Bidwell, and launched into chicken-raising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning they were impressions of disaster, and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.
