Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was an American novelist and short story writer,

known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a

successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson
had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a
writer.
At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three additional times.
His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio,[1] which launched his
career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels,
memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably
well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the
1920s, was his only bestseller.
Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916 as part of a
three-book deal with John Lane. This book, along with his second novel, Marching
Men (1917), are usually considered his "apprentice novels" because they came before
Anderson found fame with Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and are generally considered inferior in
quality to works that followed.
Anderson's most notable work is his collection of interrelated short stories, Winesburg,
Ohio (1919). In his memoir, he wrote that "Hands", the opening story, was the first "real"
story he ever wrote.
"Instead of emphasizing plot and action, Anderson used a simple, precise,
unsentimental style to reveal the frustration, loneliness, and longing in the lives of his
characters. These characters are stunted by the narrowness of Midwestern small-town life
and by their own limitations."
In addition, Anderson was one of the first American novelists to introduce new insights
from psychology, including Freudian analysis.
Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson wanted to write novels,
which he felt allowed a larger scale. In 1920, he published Poor White, which was rather
successful. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages; in it he explored the new sexual
freedom, a theme which he continued in Dark Laughter and later writing. Dark Laughter had
its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott
Fitzgerald considered Many Marriages to be Anderson's finest novel.
Beginning in 1924, Sherwood and Elizabeth Prall Anderson moved to New Orleans,
where they lived in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B St. Peter Street)
adjoining Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter. For a time, they
entertained William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson and other writers, for whom
Anderson was a major influence. Critics trying to define Anderson's significance have said
he was more influential through this younger generation than through his own works.[80]
Anderson referred to meeting Faulkner in his ambiguous and moving short story, "A
Meeting South." His novel Dark Laughter (1925) drew from his New Orleans experiences
and continued to explore the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Although the book was
satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novella The Torrents of Spring, it was a bestseller at
the time, the only book of Anderson's to reach that status during his lifetime.
 William Saroyan (1908–1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and
short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won
the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio
rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.
Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his
stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are The Time
of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands.
He has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most
prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century" and by Stephen Fry as "one of the most
underrated writers of the [20th] century." Fry suggests that "he takes his place naturally
alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner."
Saroyan published essays and memoirs, in which he depicted the people he had met
on travels in the Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw,
the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1952, Saroyan published The
Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the first of several volumes of memoirs. Several other works
were drawn from his own experiences, although his approach to autobiographical fact
contained a fair bit of poetic license. Drawn from such deeply personal sources, Saroyan's
plays often disregarded the convention that conflict is essential to drama. My Heart's in the
Highlands (1939), his first play, a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family, was
produced at the Guild Theatre in New York. He is probably best remembered for his play The
Time of Your Life (1939), set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize,
which Saroyan refused on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts; he did
accept the New York Drama Critics' Circle award. The play was adapted into a 1948
film starring James Cagney.
Before the war, Saroyan had worked on the screenplay of Golden Boy (1939), based
on Clifford Odets's play, but he never had much success in Hollywood. A second
screenplay, The Human Comedy (1943) is set in the fictional California town of Ithaca in
the San Joaquin Valley (based on Saroyan's memories of Fresno, California), where
young telegraph messenger Homer bears witness to the sorrows and joys of life
during World War II.
Saroyan served in the United States Army during World War II and was stationed
in Astoria, Queens, spending much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from
Army personnel. In 1942, he was posted to London as part of a film unit. He narrowly avoided
a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, was seen as
advocating pacifism. Interest in Saroyan's novels declined after the war, when he was
criticized for sentimentality. Freedom, brotherly love, and universal benevolence were for
him basic values, but critics considered his idealism as out of step with the times. He still
wrote prolifically, so that one of his readers could ask "How could you write so much good
stuff and still write such bad stuff?" In the novellas The Assyrian and other stories (1950)
and in The Laughing Matter (1953), Saroyan mixed allegorical elements within a realistic
novel. The plays Sam Ego's House (1949) and The Slaughter of the Innocents (1958) were
not as successful as his prewar plays. Many of Saroyan's later plays, such as The Paris
Comedy (1960), The London Comedy (1960), and Settled Out of Court (1969), premiered
in Europe. Manuscripts of a number of unperformed plays are now at Stanford
University with his other papers.
When Ernest Hemingway learned that Saroyan had made fun of the controversial non-
fiction work Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway responded: "We've seen them come and
go - good ones too, better ones than you, Mr. Saroyan."
Saroyan also painted. He said: "I made drawings before I learned how to write. The
impulse to do so seems basic - it is both the invention and the use of language." His abstract
expressionist works were exhibited by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City. From
1958 on, William Saroyan mainly resided in a Paris apartment. In the late 1960s and 1970s,
Saroyan earned more money and finally got out of debt. In 1979, he was inducted into
the American Theater Hall of Fame. The Indian educational board CBSE has added a
chapter of his in the book "Snapshots" named "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse"
in his honour.