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莱德镇的一个贫寒家庭。为了帮助家里，安德森从小就干过各种各样的活，没有受过多少正规的学校教育。短暂的参军后，他开始下海经商。在过着生意兴隆的商人生活的同时，他也在悄悄地写小说。由于被生意中、个人生活中和艺术生活中的种种问题所困扰，在1912年的一天，他突然离家出走，决心用自己的笔过另一种更有意义的生活。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.
