Portrayal of writers

Sherwood Anderson, who abandoned business to become a writer

In an interview, William Faulkner stated that Sherwood Anderson was "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of Amercan which our successors will carry on".

Windy Mcpherson's Son, was a harness-maker by vocation and a boozer and tale-teller by avocation. But as factory-made harnesses put independent craftsmen out of business the Anderson family sank in the social scale until the mother was taking in washing. The father's avocation more and ore replaced the vocation.

All of the seven Anderson children were energetic and ambitious, but Sherwood, from childhood on, was notable for his great enterprise and push. He had grown up in the small town of Clyde, the original of the fictional Winesburg, Ohio, which was the setting of his most notable work. He worked on farms, in livery stables, and on racetracks. These experiences later appeared in short stories that dealt generally with the emotional problems of boyhood. These are some of his most mature writings, reflecting the early conflict of his creative ipulse with the spiritual poverty of small-town life and intimating the gradual alienation of his father which was a source of his chronic emotional disunity. He married a girl who had been to college, was a member of a sorority, and had taken the European tour. Anderson cast himself as the star in a Horatio Alger story,and his first literary efforts, published in trade journals, hymned "boosterism" and the business ethic -- as Dreiser, in the 1890's, had done in editorials in his pulp magazines, asserting, for instance, that "Success is what counts in the world, and it little matters how success is won".

But along the way, something came over him. By that time he had been in advertising some twelve years, working his way up from copy and sales to become president of his own firm. But money and management problems were harassing the Roof-Fix Man, as Anderson called himself in his ads; he had been using cheap ingredients in order to increase profits. Some of these troubles he escaped at night, when he retreated to a desk in his attic to write. All these have contributed to the crisis which gave rise to the myth about Sherwood Anderson -- that in the middle of a successful advertising career he repudiated the money-making ethics and the regimentation of business in order to realize himself as a writer.

The crisis coocurred on an autumn morning before Thanksgiving. He was his office that morning "buying and selling as usual", dictating letters, when suddenly he had a moment of terrible clarity, an epiphanic moment when the fraudulent quality of his life was revealed to him and he realized that he was being dishonest with words and dishonest with himself. He wanted to uproot himself, to walk out of the door and out of that baleful phase of his life. Thinking of his feet, he turned to his secretary and said, "I have been wading in a long river, and my feet are wet.""I will be a servant to words alone." The words are recorded in one of the three moody autobiographies in which he labored to create the image of himself as an upwardly mobile businessman, the American dream of making money, only to find that in the cutthroat competition he was losing his compassion for his fellow men.

That country was changing rapidly from an agrarian to an industrial economy with its new methods of mass production, its efficient assembly lines, its standardization of parts and of lives. In this change, and in the greedy pursuit of money that paralleled it, Anderson foresaw the consequent impoverishment of the spirit and estrangement of the individual. He lamented this wanting of the pastoral life, and he warned against the shrinking significance of the human being in the expansion of industrial, urban society.

舍伍德·安德森

弃商从文的安德森

在一次采访中，威廉·福克纳说舍伍德·安德森是“我这一代美国作家的父亲，我们的继任者将继承美国的传统”。

文迪·麦克弗森的儿子，职业是制造农具，业余爱好是喝酒和讲故事。但是，由于工厂生产的马具让独立的工匠们失业，安德森一家的社会地位开始下降，直到母亲开始洗衣服。父亲的业余爱好越来越多地取代了职业。

安德森的七个孩子都精力充沛，雄心勃勃，但舍伍德从童年起就以其伟大的进取心和雄心勃勃而闻名。他在克莱德的一个小村庄长大，克莱德是小说《小城畸人》的原型，Winesburg, Ohio是他最著名的作品的背景。他在农场、马房和赛马场工作。这些经历后来出现在短篇小说中，一般都是关于童年时期的情感问题。这些都是他最成熟的作品，反映了他早期的创作冲动与小镇生活的精神贫困的冲突，并暗示了他父亲的逐渐疏远，这是他长期情绪不统一的根源。他娶了一个上过大学的女孩，是一个女生联谊会的成员，还参加过欧洲旅行。在霍雷肖·阿尔杰(Horatio Alger)的小说中，他把自己定位为明星。他的第一次文学成就发表在行业杂志上，歌颂“支持者”(boosterism)和商业伦理——就像19世纪90年代的德莱塞(Dreiser)在《低俗杂志》(pulp)上发表的社论一样，他断言，“成功是世界上最重要的东西，而成功如何赢得并不重要”。

但顺便说一句，有些事情发生在他身上。那时，他已经在广告业干了大约12年，从文案和销售人员一步步晋升为自己公司的总裁。但是，正如安德森在广告中自称的那样，资金和管理问题一直困扰着这位修理屋顶的人;为了增加利润，他一直在使用廉价的原料。晚上，当他躲到阁楼的书桌前写作时，这些麻烦中的一些就逃了出来。所有这些都促成了这场危机，这场危机催生了舍伍德•安德森(Sherwood Anderson)的神话——在成功的广告生涯中，为了实现自己作为一名作家的身份，他摒弃了赚钱的道德规范和商业的严守成规。

感恩节前的一个秋日早晨，这场危机悄声低语。那天早上，他在自己的办公室里“像往常一样买卖”，口述信件。突然，他有了一个惊人的清醒时刻，一个顿悟的时刻，他发现自己的生活质量受到了欺骗，他意识到自己在撒谎，也在欺骗自己。他想要重新站起来，走出家门，走出他生命中那个邪恶的阶段。想到他的脚，他转向他的秘书说:“我一直在一条很长的河里涉水，我的脚是湿的。”“我只做语言的仆人。”这句话被记录在三本喜怒无常的自传之一。在这本自传中，他努力塑造自己向上流动的商人形象，即赚钱的美国梦，却发现自己在残酷的竞争中失去了对同胞的同情。

该国正在迅速地从农业经济转变为工业经济，其新的大规模生产方法、高效率的装配线、零件和生活的标准化。在这种变化中，在与之相对应的对金钱的贪婪追求中，安德森预见到了随之而来的精神贫困和个人的疏远。他哀叹这种对田园生活的缺乏，并警告人们，在工业和城市社会的扩张中，人类的重要性正在缩小。

Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 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.

舍伍德·安德森（1876年9月13日—1941年3月8日）是美国小说家和短篇小说作家，以其主观和自我揭示的作品而闻名。他自学成才，在俄亥俄州克利夫兰和伊利里亚成为一名成功的文案和企业主。1912年，安德森因精神崩溃而放弃了事业和家庭，成为一名作家。

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.

当时，他搬到芝加哥，最后又结了三次婚。他最经久不衰的作品是俄亥俄州怀恩斯堡的短篇小说，这部电影开创了他的事业。

Write a short composition within 250 words on the topic - my childhood.

写一篇250字以内的短篇作文，主题是“我的童年”。

• https://lanfeizi.wixsite.com/english-learning/blog/my-childhood

• 童年记忆