Sherwood Anderson, now regarded as one of the most important American writers in the short-story form, was born to Irwin McLain Anderson and Emma Smith in Camden, Ohio, on 13 September 1876 and raised in Clyde, Ohio. After a variety of jobs in Clyde (his education was interrupted often by the necessity of having to help support the family), he was successively a laborer in Chicago and a private and corporal in an Ohio volunteer infantry company in the Spanish-American War. After the war he returned to school for one year before embarking on a business career as an advertising copywriter and salesman in Chicago. On 16 May 1904 he married Cornelia Lane, the daughter of the head of a wholesale firm. In 1906 he became president of a mail-order company in Cleveland, and in 1907 he founded his own mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio. In Elyria he had apparently begun to write, well before his abrupt break with the business world in 1913.
